>>Hello everyone. Welcome to the Special Cube presentation of Accelerating Business Transformation on vmc on aws. I'm John Furrier, host of the Queue. We have Chief Dawan, Director of global sales, and go to market for VMware Cloud Ons. This is a great showcase and should be a lot of fun. Ashish, thanks for coming on. >>Hi, John. Thank you so much. >>So VMware cloud on AWS has been well documented as this big success for VMware and aws. As customers move their workloads into the cloud IT operations of VMware customers has signaling a lot of change. This is changing the landscape globally as on cloud migration and beyond. What's your take on this? Can you open this up with the most important story around VMC on aws? >>Yes, John. The most important thing for our customers today is the how they can safely and swiftly move their ID infrastructure and applications to the cloud. Now, VMware Cloud AWS is a service that allows all vSphere based workloads to move to cloud safely, swiftly, and reliably. Banks can move their core, core banking platforms, insurance companies move their core insurance platforms, telcos move their GOs, bss, plat platforms, government organizations are moving their citizen engagement platforms using VMC on aws because this is one platform that allows you to move it, move their VMware based platforms very fast. Migrations can happen in a matter of days instead of months, extremely securely. It's a VMware managed service. It's very secure and highly reliably. It gets the, the reliability of the underlyings infrastructure along with it. So win-win from our customer's >>Perspective. You know, we reported on this big news in 2016 with Andy Chassis and Pat Geling at the time, a lot of people said it was a bad deal. It turned out to be a great deal because not only could VMware customers actually have a cloud migrate to the cloud, do it safely, which was their number one concern. They didn't want to have disruption to their operations, but also position themselves for what's beyond just shifting to the cloud. So I have to ask you, since you got the finger on the pulse here, what are we seeing in the market when it comes to migrating and modern modernizing in the cloud? Because that's the next step. They go to the cloud, you guys have done that, doing it, then they go, I gotta modernize, which means kind of upgrading or refactoring. What's your take on that? >>Yeah, absolutely. Look, the first step is to help our customers assess their infrastructure and licensing and entire ID operations. Once we've done the assessment, we then create their migration plans. A lot of our customers are at that inflection point. They're, they're looking at their real estate data center, real estate. They're looking at their contracts with colocation vendors. They really want to exit their data centers, right? And VMware cloud and AWS is a perfect solution for customers who wanna exit their data centers, migrate these applications onto the AWS platform using VMC on aws, get rid of additional real estate overheads, power overheads, be socially and environmentally conscious by doing that as well, right? So that's the migration story, but to your point, it doesn't end there, right? Modernization is a critical aspect of the entire customer journey is as well. Customers, once they've migrated their ID applications and infrastructure on cloud, get access to all the modernization services that AWS has. They can correct easily to our data lake services, to our AIML services, to custom databases, right? They can decide which applications they want to keep and which applications they wanna refactor. They want to take decisions on containerization, take decisions on service computing once they've come to the cloud. But the most important thing is to take that first step, you know, exit their data centers, come to AWS using VMC or aws, and then a whole host of modernization options available to them. >>Yeah, I gotta say, we had this right on this, on this story because you just pointed out a big thing, which was first order of business is to make sure to leverage the on-prem investments that those customers made and then migrate to the cloud where they can maintain their applications, their data, their infrastructure operations that they're used to, and then be in position to start getting modern. So I have to ask you, how are you guys specifically, or how is VMware cloud ons addressing these needs of the customers? Because what happens next is something that needs to happen faster, and sometimes the skills might not be there because if they're running old school IT ops now they gotta come in and jump in. They're gonna use data cloud, they're gonna want to use all kinds of machine learning, and there's a lot of great goodness going on above the stack there. So as you move with the higher level services, you know, it's a no brainer, obviously, but they're not, it's not yesterday's higher level services in the cloud. So how are, how is this being addressed? >>Absolutely. I think you hit up on a very important point, and that is skills, right? When our customers are operating, some of the most critical applications I just mentioned, core banking, core insurance, et cetera, they're most of the core applications that our customers have across industries, even even large scale ERP systems, they're actually sitting on VMware's vSphere platform right now. When the customer wants to migrate these to cloud, one of the key bottlenecks they face is skill sets. They have the trained manpower for these core applications, but for these high level services, they may not, right? So the first order of business is to help them ease this migration pain as much as possible by not wanting them to, to upscale immediately. And v VMware clouds exactly does that. I mean, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to create new skill set for doing this, right? Their existing skill sets suffice, but at the same time, it gives them that, that leeway to build that skills roadmap for their team. And AWS is invested in that, right? We want to help them build those skills in the high level services, be it aml, be it, be it iot, be it data lake and analytics. We want to invest in them, and we help our customers through that. So that ultimately the ultimate goal of making them draw data is, is, is front and center. >>I wanna get into some of the use cases and success stories, but I want to just reiterate, hit back your point on the skill thing. Because if you look at what you guys have done at aws, you've essentially, and Andy Chassey used to talk about this all the time when I would interview him, and now last year Adam was seeing the same thing. You guys do all the heavy lifting, but if you're a VMware customer user or operator, you are used to things. You don't have to be relearn to be a cloud architect. Now you're already in the game. So this is like almost like a instant path to cloud skills for the VMware, and there's hundreds of thousands of, of VMware architects and operators that now instantly become cloud architects, literally overnight. Can you respond to that? Do you agree with that? And then give an example. >>Yes, absolutely. You know, if you have skills on the VMware platform, you know, migrating to AWS using via by cloud and AWS is absolutely possible. You don't have to really change the skills. The operations are exactly the same. The management systems are exactly the same. So you don't really have to change anything, but the advantages that you get access to all the other AWS services. So you are instantly able to integrate with other AWS services, and you become a cloud architect immediately, right? You're able to solve some of the critical problems that your underlying IT infrastructure has immediately using this. And I think that's a great value proposition for our customers to use this service. >>And just one more point, I wanna just get into something that's really kind of inside baseball or nuanced VMC or VMware cloud on AWS means something. Could you take a minute to explain what on AWS means? Just because you're like hosting and using Amazon as a, as a work workload? Being ONS means something specific in your world, being VMC on AWS mean? >>Yes. This is a great question, by the way, You know, on AWS means that, you know, VMware's vSphere platform is, is a, is an iconic enterprise virtualization software. It's got, you know, a disproportionately high market share across industries. So when we wanted to create a cloud product along with them, obviously our aim was for them, for the, for this platform to have the goodness of the AWS underlying infrastructure, right? And, and therefore, when we created this VMware cloud solution, it, it literally used the AWS platform under the eighth, right? And that's why it's called VMs, VMware cloud on AWS, using, using the, the, the wide portfolio of our regions across the world and the strength of the underlying infrastructure, the reliability and, and, and sustainability that it offers. And therefore this product is called VMC on aws. >>It's a distinction I think is worth noting, and it does reflect engineering and some levels of integration that go well beyond just having a SASS app and, and basic platform as a service or past services. So I just wanna make sure that now super cloud, we'll talk about that a little bit in another interview, but I gotta get one more question in before we get into the use cases and customer success stories is in, in most of the VM world, VMware world, in that IT world that used to, when you heard migration, people would go, Oh my God, that's gonna take months. And when I hear about moving stuff around and doing cloud native, the first reaction people might have is complexity. So two questions for you before we move on to the next talk. Track complexity. How are you addressing the complexity issue and how long do these migrations take? Is it easy, is it hard? I mean, you know, the knee jerk reaction is month, You're very used to that. If they're dealing with Oracle or other old school vendors, like, they're, like the old guard would be like, takes a year to move stuff around. So can you comment on complexity and speed? >>Yeah. So the first, first thing is complexity. And you know, what makes what makes anything complex is if you're, if you're required to acquire new skill sets or you've gotta, if you're required to manage something differently, and as far as VMware cloud on AWS on both these aspects, you don't have to do anything, right? You don't have to acquire new skill sets. Your existing ideal operations skill sets on, on VMware's platforms are absolutely fine and you don't have to manage it any differently. Like Dan, what you're managing your, your ID infrastructure today. So in both these aspects, it's exactly the same. And therefore it is absolutely not complex as far as, as far as, as far as ve VMware, cloud and AWS is concerned. And the other thing is speed. Now, this is where the huge differentiation is. You have seen that, you know, large banks and large telcos have now moved their workloads, you know, literally in days instead of months. >>Because because of VMware cloud and aws, a lot of time customers come to us with specific deadlines because they want to exit their data centers on a particular date. And what happens, VMware cloud and AWS is called upon to do that migration, right? So speed is absolutely critical. The reason is also exactly the same because you are using the exactly the same platform, the same management systems, people are available to you, you're able to migrate quickly, right? I would just reference recently we got an award from President Linsky of Ukraine for, you know, migrating their entire ID digital infrastructure and, and that that happened because they were using VMware cloud radio based and happened very swiftly. >>That's not a great example. I mean, that's one political, but the economic advantage of getting outta the data center could be national security. You mentioned Ukraine, I mean I bombing and death over there. So clearly that's a critical crown jewel for their running their operations, which is, you know, world mission critical. So great stuff. I love the speed thing. I think that's a huge one. Let's get into some of the use cases. One of them is, the first one I wanted to talk about was we, you just hit on data, data center migration. It could be financial reasons on a downturn or our, or a market growth. People can make money by shifting to the cloud, either saving money or making money. You win on both sides. It's a, it's a, it's almost a recession proof, if you will. Cloud is so use case for number one data center migration. Take us through what that looks like. Give it an example of a success. Take us through a day in the life of a data center migration in, in a couple minutes. >>Yeah. You know, I can give you an example of, of a, of a large bank who decided to migrate, you know, their, all their data centers outside their existing interest. And they had, they had a set timeline, right? They had a set timeline to migrate the, they were coming up on a deal and they wanted to make sure that this set timeline is met. We did a, a complete assessment of their infrastructure. We did a complete assessment of their IT applications, more than 80% of their IT applications, underlying v vSphere platform. And we, we thought that the right solution for them in the timeline that they wanted, right, is VMware cloud gas. And obviously it was a large bank, it wanted to do it safely and securely. It wanted to have it completely managed, and therefore VMware cloud and aws, you know, ticked all the boxes as far as that is concerned. >>I'll be happy to report that the large bank has moved to most of their applications on AWS exiting three of their data centers, and they'll be exiting 12 more very soon. So that's a great example of, of, of the large bank exiting data centers. There's another gallery to that. Not only did they manage to manage to exit their data centers and of course be more agile, but they also met their sustainability goals. Their board of directors had given them goals to be carbon neutral by 2025. They found out that 35% of all their carbon F footprint was in their data centers. And if they moved their, their ID infrastructure to cloud, they would severely reduce the, the carbon footprint, which is 35% down to 17 to 18%. Right? And that met their, their, their, their sustainability targets and their commitment to the, to being carbon neutral as well. >>And that they, and they shift that to you guys. Would you guys take that burden? A heavy lifting there and you guys have a sustainability story, which is a whole nother showcase in and of itself. >>We can exactly. And, and cause of the scale of our, of our operations, we are able to, we are able to work on that really well as well. >>All right. So love the data migration. I think that's got real proof points. You got, I can save money, I can, I can and move and position my applications into the cloud for that reason and other reasons as a lot of other reasons to do that. But now it gets into what you mentioned earlier was, okay, data migration, clearly a use case and you laid out some successes. I'm sure there's a zillion others. But then the next step comes, now you got cloud architects becoming minted every, and you got managed services and higher level services. What happens next? Can you give us an example of the use case of the modernization around the NextGen workloads, NextGen applications? We're starting to see, you know, things like data clouds, not data warehouses. We're not gonna have data clouds. It's gonna be all kinds of clouds. These NextGen apps are pure digital transformation in action. Take us through a use case of how you guys make that happen with a success story. >>Yes, absolutely. And this is, this is an amazing success story and the customer here is s and p global ratings. As you know, s and p global ratings is, is the world leader as far as global ratings, global credit ratings is concerned. And for them, you know, the last couple of years have been tough as far as hardware procurement is concerned, right? The pandemic has really upended the, the supply chain. And it was taking a lot of time to procure hardware, you know, configure it in time, make sure that that's reliable. And then, you know, distributed in the wide variety of, of, of offices and locations that they have. And they came to us. We, we did, again, a, a a a alar, a fairly large comprehensive assessment of their ID infrastructure and their licensing contracts. And we also found out that VMware cloud and AWS is the right solution for them. >>So we worked there, migrated all their applications, and as soon as we migrated all their applications, they got, they got access to, you know, our high level services be a analytics services, our machine learning services, our, our, our, our artificial intelligence services that have been critical for them, for their growth. And, and that really is helping them, you know, get towards their next level of modern applications. Right Now, obviously going forward, they will have, they will have the choice to, you know, really think about which applications they want to, you know, refactor or which applications they want to go ahead with. That is really a choice in front of them. And, but you know, the, we VMware cloud and AWS really gave them the opportunity to first migrate and then, you know, move towards modernization with speed. >>You know, the speed of a startup is always the kind of the Silicon Valley story where you're, you know, people can make massive changes in 18 months, whether that's a pivot or a new product. You see that in startup world. Now, in the enterprise, you can see the same thing. I noticed behind you on your whiteboard, you got a slogan that says, are you thinking big? I know Amazon likes to think big, but also you work back from the customers. And, and I think this modern application thing's a big deal because I think the mindset has always been constrained because back before they moved to the cloud, most IT, and, and, and on-premise data center shops, it's slow. You gotta get the hardware, you gotta configure it, you gotta, you gotta stand it up, won't make sure all the software is validated on it, and loading a database and loading oss, I mean, yeah, it got easier and with scripting and whatnot, but when you move to the cloud, you have more scale, which means more speed, which means it opens up their capability to think differently and build product. What are you seeing there? Can you share your opinion on that epiphany of, Wow, things are going fast, I got more time to actually think about maybe doing a cloud native app or transforming this or that. What's your, what's your reaction to that? Can you share your opinion? >>Well, ultimately we, we want our customers to utilize, you know, most of our modern services, you know, applications should be microservices based when desired, they should use serverless, applic, serverless technology. They should not have monolithic, you know, relational database contracts. They should use custom databases. They should use containers when needed, right? So ultimately, we want our customers to use these modern technologies to make sure that their IT infrastructure, their licensing, their, their entire IT spend is completely native to cloud technologies. They work with the speed of a startup, but it's important for them to, to, to get to the first step, right? So that's why we create this journey for our customers, where you help them migrate, give them time to build the skills, they'll help them modernize, take our partners along with their, along with us to, to make sure that they can address the need for our customers. That's, that's what our customers need today, and that's what we are working backwards from. >>Yeah, and I think that opens up some big ideas. I'll just say that, you know, we were joking, I was joking the other night with someone here in, in Palo Alto around serverless, and I said, you know, soon you're gonna hear words like architecture lists. And that's a criticism on one hand, but you might say, Hey, you know, if you don't really need an architecture, you know, storage list, I mean, at the end of the day, infrastructure is code means developers can do all the it in the coding cycles and then make the operations cloud based. And I think this is kind of where I see the dots connecting. Final thought here, take us through what you're thinking around how this new world is evolving. I mean, architecture kind of a joke, but the point is, you know, you have to some sort of architecture, but you don't have to overthink it. >>Totally. Now, that's a great thought, by the way. I know it's a joke, but it's a great thought because at the end of the day, you know, what do the customers really want? They want outcomes, right? Why did service technology come? It was because there was an outcome that they needed. They didn't want to get stuck with, you know, the, the, the real estate of, of a, of a server. They wanted to use compute when they needed to, right? Similarly, what you're talking about is, you know, outcome based, you know, desire of our customers and, and, and that's exactly where the word is going to, Right? Cloud really enforces that, right? We are actually, you know, working backwards from a customer's outcome and using our area, the breadth and depth of our services to, to deliver those outcomes, right? And, and most of our services are in that path, right? When we use VMware cloud and aws, the outcome is a, to migrate then to modernize, but doesn't stop there, use our native services, you know, get the business outcomes using this. So I think that's, that's exactly what we are going through. >>Actually, I say she the director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on Aus. I wanna thank you for coming on, but I'll give you the final minute. Give a plug, explain what is the VMware cloud on Aus, Why is it great? Why should people engage with you and, and the team, and what ultimately is this path look like for them going forward? >>Yeah, at the end of the day, we want our customers to have the best parts to the cloud, right? The, the best parts to the cloud is making sure that they migrate safely, reliably, and securely as well as with speed, right? And then, you know, use that cloud platform to, to utilize AWS's native services to make sure that they modernize their IT infrastructure and applications, right? We want, ultimately that our customers, customers, customer get the best out of, you know, utilizing that, that whole application experience is enhanced tremendously by using our services. And I think that's, that's exactly what we are working towards VMware cloud AWS is, is helping our customers in that journey towards migrating, modernizing, whether they want to exit a data center or whether they wanna modernize their applications. It's in the central first step that we wanna help our customers with >>Wan, director of global sales and go to market with VMware cloud on neighbors. He's with aws sharing his thoughts on accelerating business transformation on aws. This is showcase, We're talking about the future path. We're talking about use cases with success stories from customers as she's thank you for spending time today on this showcase. >>Thank you, John. I >>Appreciate it. Okay. This is the cube, special coverage, special presentation of the AWS Showcase. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

la from Las Vegas it's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon Web Services and in care along with its ecosystem partners hey welcome back everyone cubes live coverage of eight of us reinvent 2019 this is the cube seventh year covering Amazon reinvent it's their eighth year of the conference and want to just shout out to Intel for their sponsorship for these two amazing sets without their support we would be able to bring our mission of great content to you I'm John Force to many men we're here with the chief of AWS the chief executive officer Andy chassis tech athlete and himself three our keynotes welcome to the cube again great to see you great to be here thanks for having me guys congratulations on a great show a lot of great buzz thank you a lot of good stuff your keynote was phenomenal you get right into you giddy up right into as you say three hours 30 announcements you guys do a lot but what I liked the new addition in the last year and this year is the band house man yeah they're pretty good they hit the Queen note so that keeps it balanced so we're going to work on getting a band for the cube awesome so if I have to ask you what's your walk-up song what would it be there's so many choices depends what kind of mood I'm in but maybe times like these by the Foo Fighters these are unusual times right now Foo Fighters playing at the Amazon intersect show they are Gandy well congratulations on the intersect you got a lot going on intersect is the music festival I'll get that in a second but I think the big news for me is two things obviously we had a one-on-one exclusive interview and you laid out essentially what looks like was gonna be your keynote it was transformation key for the practice I'm glad to practice use me anytime yeah and I like to appreciate the comments on Jedi on the record that was great but I think the transformation story is a very real one but the NFL news you guys just announced to me was so much fun and relevant you had the Commissioner of NFL on stage with you talking about a strategic partnership that is as top-down aggressive goals you could get yeah I have Roger Goodell fly to a tech conference to sit with you and then bring his team talk about the deal well you know we've been partners with the NFL for a while with the next-gen stats are they using all their telecasts and one of the things I really like about Roger is that he's very curious and very interested in technology in the first couple times I spoke with him he asked me so many questions about ways the NFL might be able to use the cloud and digital transformation to transform their various experiences and he's always said if you have a creative idea or something you think that could change the world for us just call me is it or text me or email me and I'll call you back within 24 hours and so we've spent the better part of the last year talking about a lot of really interesting strategic ways that they can evolve their experience both for fans as well as their players and the player health and safe safety initiative it's so important in sports and particularly important with the NFL given the nature of the sport and they've always had a focus on it but what you can do with computer vision and machine learning algorithms and then building a digital athlete which is really like a digital twin of each athlete so you understand what does it look like when they're healthy what and compare that when it looks like they may not be healthy and be able to simulate all kinds of different combinations of player hits and angles and different plays so that you can try to predict injuries and predict the right equipment you need before there's a problem can be really transformational so it was super excited about it did you guys come up with the idea it was the collaboration between there's really a collaboration I mean they look they are very focused on player's safety and health and it's it's a big deal for their you know they have two main constituents that the players and fans and they care deeply about the players and it's a it's a hard problem in a sport like football but you watch it yeah I gotta say it does point out the use cases of what you guys are promoting heavily at the show here of the stage maker studio which is a big part of your keynote where they have all this data right and they're dated hoarders they've the hoard data but they're the manual process of going through the data it was a killer problem this is consistent with a lot of the enterprises that are out there they have more data than they even know so this seems to be a big part of the strategy how do you get the customers to actually a wake up to the fact that they got data and how do you tie that together I think in almost every company they know they have a lot of data and there are always pockets of people who want to do something with it but when you're gonna make these really big leaps forward these transformations so things like Volkswagen is doing with they're reinventing their factories in their manufacturing process or the NFL where they're gonna radically transform how they do players health and safety it starts top-down and if they if the senior leader isn't convicted about wanting to take that leap forward and trying something different and organizing the data differently and organizing the team differently and using machine learning and getting help from us and building algorithms and building some muscle inside the company it just doesn't happen because it's not in the normal machinery of what most companies do and so it all wait almost always starts top-down sometimes it can be the commissioner or the CEO sometimes it can be the CIO but it has to be senior level conviction or it does get off the ground and the business model impact has to be real for NFL they know concussions hurting their youth pipelining this is a huge issue for them is their business model they they lose even more players to lower extremity injuries and so just the notion of trying to be able to predict injuries and you know the impact it can have on rules the impact it can have on the equipment they use it's a huge game changer when they look at the next 10 to 20 years all right love geeking out on the NFL but no more do you know off camera a 10 man is here defeated season so everybody's a Patriots fan now it's fascinating to watch you and your three-hour keynote Vernor in his you know architectural discussion really showed how AWS is really extending its reach you know it's not just a place for a few years people have been talking about you know cloud as an operation operational model it's not a destination or a location but I felt that really was laid out is you talked about breadth and depth and Verna really talked about you know architectural differentiation people talk about cloud but there are very there are a lot of differences between the vision for where things are going help us understand and why I mean Amazon's vision is still a bit different from what other people talk about where this whole cloud expansion journey but put over what tagger label you want on it but you know the control plane and the technology that you're building and where you see that going well I think that we've talked about this a couple times we we have two macro types of customers we have those that really want to get at the load level building blocks and stitch them together creatively and however they see fit to create whatever is in there in their heads and then we have this second segment of customers who say look I'm willing to give up some of that flexibility in exchange for getting 80% of the way they're much faster in an abstraction that's different from those low level building blocks in both segments of builders we want to serve and serve well and so we built very significant offerings in both areas I think when you look at micro services you know some of it has to do with the fact that we have this very strongly held belief born out of several years at Amazon where you know the first seven or eight years of Amazon's consumer business we basically jumbled together all of the parts of our technology and moving really quickly and when we wanted to move quickly where you had to impact multiple internal development teams it was so long because it was this big ball this big monolithic piece and we got religion about that and trying to move faster in the consumer business and having to tease those pieces apart and it really was a lot of the impetus behind conceiving AWS where it was these low-level very flexible building blocks that don't try and make all the decisions for customers they get to make them themselves and some of the micro services that you saw Verner talking about just you know for instance what we what we did with nitro or even what we do with firecracker those are very much about us relentlessly working to continue to to tease apart the different components and even things that look like low-level building blocks over time you build more and more features and all of a sudden you realize they have a lot of things that are they were combined together that you wished weren't that slowed you down and so nitro was a completely reimagining of our hypervisor and virtualization layer to allow us both to let customers have better performance but also to let us move faster and have a better security story for our customers I got to ask you the question around transformation because I think it all points to that all the data points you got all the references goldman-sachs on stage at the keynote Cerner and the healthcare just an amazing example because I mean this demonstrating real value there there's no excuse I talked to someone who wouldn't be named last night and then around the area said the CIA has a cost bar like this cost up on a budget like this but the demand for mission based apps is going up exponentially so there's need for the cloud and so seeing more and more of that what is your top-down aggressive goals to fill that solution base because you're also very transformational thinker what is your what is your aggressive top-down goals for your organization because you're serving a market with trillions of dollars of span that's shifting that's on the table a lot of competition now sees it too they're gonna go after it but at the end of the day you have customers that have that demand for things apps yeah and not a lot of budget increase at the same time this is a huge dynamic what's your goals you know I think that at a high level are top-down aggressive goals so that we want every single customer who uses our platform to have an outstanding customer experience and we want that outstanding customer experience in part is that their operational performance and their security are outstanding but also that it allows them to build and it build projects and initiatives that change their customer experience and allow them to be a sustainable successful business over a long period of time and then we also really want to be the technology infrastructure platform under all the applications that people build and they were realistic we know that that you know the market segments we address with infrastructure software hardware and data center services globally are trillions of dollars in the long term it won't only be us but we have that goal of wanting to serve every application and that requires not just the security operational performance but also a lot of functionality a lot of capability we have by far the most amount of capability out there and yet I would tell you we have three to five years of items on our roadmap that customers want us to add and that's just what we know today well and any underneath the covers you've been going through some transformation when we talked a couple years ago about how serverless is impacting things I've heard that that's actually in many ways glue behind the two pizza teams to work between organizations talk about how the internal transformations are happening how that impacts your discussions with customers that are going through that transformation well I mean there's a lot of a lot of the technology we build comes from things that we're doing ourselves you know and that we're learning ourselves it's kind of how we started thinking about microservices serverless - we saw the need we know we would have we would build all these functions that when some kind of object came into an object store we would spin up compute all those tasks would take like three or four hundred milliseconds then we spin it back down and yet we'd have to keep a cluster up in multiple availability zones because we needed that fault tolerance and it was we just said this is wasteful and that's part of how we came up with lambda and that you know when we were thinking about lambda people understandably said well if we build lambda and we build the serverless event-driven computing a lot of people who are keeping clusters of instances aren't going to use them anymore it's going to lead to less absolute revenue for us but we we have learned this lesson over the last 20 years at Amazon which is if it's something it's good for customers you're much better off cannibalizing yourself and doing the right thing for customers and being part of shaping something and I think if you look at the history of Technology you always build things and people say well that's gonna cannibalize this and people are gonna spend less money what really ends up happening is they spend spend less money per unit of compute but it allows them to do so much more that the ultimately long-term end up being you know more significant customers I mean you are like beating the drum all the time customers what they say we implement the roadmap I got that you guys have that playbook down that's been really successful for you yeah two years ago you told me machine learning was really important to you because your customers told what's the next tranche of importance for customers what's on top of mine now as you look at this reinvent kind of coming to a close replays tonight you had conversations your your tech a fleet you're running around doing speeches talking to customers what's that next hill from from my fist machine learning today there's so much I mean that's not it's not a soup question you know I think we're still in this in the very early days of machine learning it's not like most companies have mastered yet even though they're using it much more than they did in the past but you know I think machine learning for sure I think the edge for sure I think that we're optimistic about quantum computing even though I think it'll be a few years before it's really broadly useful we're very enthusiastic about robotics I think the amount of functions are going to be done by these robotic applications are much more expansive than people realize it doesn't mean humans won't have jobs they're just going to work on things that are more value-added I thought we're believers in augmented and virtual reality we're big believers and what's going to happen with voice and I'm also I think sometimes people get bored you know I think you're even bored with machine learning maybe already but yet people get bored with the things you've heard about but I think just what we've done with the chips you know in terms of giving people 40% better price performance in the latest generation of x86 processors it's pretty unbelievable and the difference in what people are going to be able to do or just look at big data I mean big date we haven't gotten through big data where people have totally solved it the amount of data that companies want to store process and analyze is exponentially larger than it was a few years ago and it will I think exponentially increase again in the next few years you need different tools the service I think we're not we're not for with machine learning we're excited to get started because we have all this data from the video and you guys got sage maker yeah we call it a stairway to machine learning heaven we start with the data move up what now guys are very sophisticated with what you do with technology and machine learning and there's so much I mean we're just kind of again in this early innings and I think that it was soaked before sage maker was so hard for everyday developers and data scientists to build models but the combination of sage maker and what's happened with thousands of companies standardizing on it the last two years Plus now sage maker studio giant leap forward we hope to use the data to transform our experience with our audience and we're on Amazon Cloud I really appreciate that and appreciate your support if we're with Amazon and Instant get that machine learning going a little faster for us a big that'll be better if you have requests so any I'm you talked about that you've got the customers that are builders and the customers that need simplification traditionally when you get into the you know the heart of the majority of adoption of something you really need to simplify that environment but when I think about the successful enterprise of the future they need to be builders yeah so has the model flipped if you know I normally would said enterprise want to pay for solutions because they don't have the skill set but if they're gonna succeed in this new economy they need to go through that transformation that yeah so I mean are we in just a total new era when we look back will this be different than some of these previous waves it's a it's a really good question Stu and I I don't think there's a simple answer to it I think that a lot of enterprises in some ways I think wish that they could just skip the low level building blocks and and only operate at that higher level abstraction it's why people were so excited by things like sage maker or code guru or Kendra or contact lens these are all services that allow them to just send us data and then run it on our models and get back the answers but I think one of the big trends that we see with enterprises is that they are taking more and more of their development in-house and they are wanting to operate more and more like startups I think that they admire what companies like Airbnb and Pinterest and slack and and you know Robin Hood and a whole bunch of those companies stripe have done and so when you know I think you go through these phases and errors where there are waves of success at different companies and then others want to follow that success and and replicate and so we see more and more enterprises saying we need to take back a lot of that development in-house and as they do that and as they add more developers those developers in most cases like to deal with the building blocks and they have a lot of ideas on how they can create us to creatively stitch them together on that point I want to just quickly ask you on Amazon versus other clouds because you made a comment to me in our interview about how hard it is to provide a service that to other people and it's hard to have a service that you're using yourself and turn that around and the most quoted line in my story was the compression algorithm there's no compression outliving for experience which to me is the diseconomies of scale for taking shortcuts yeah and so I think this is a really interesting point just add some color comments or I think this is a fundamental difference between AWS and others because you guys have a trajectory over the years of serving at scale customers wherever they are whatever they want to do now you got micro services it's even more complex that's hard yeah how about that I think there are a few elements to that notion of there's no compression algorithm I think the first thing to know about AWS which is different is we just come from a different heritage in a different background we sweep ran a business for a long time that was our sole business that was a consumer retail business that was very low margin and so we had to operate a very large scale given how many people were using us but also we had to run infrastructure services deep in the stack compute storage and database in reliable scalable data centers at very low costs and margins and so when you look at our our business it actually today I mean it's it's a higher margin business in our retail business the lower margin business and software companies but at real scale it's a it's a high-volume relatively low margin business and the way that you have to operate to be successful with those businesses and the things you have to think about and that DNA come from the type of operators that we have to be in our consumer retail business and there's nobody else in our space that does that you know the way that we think about cost the way we think about innovation and the data center and and I also think the way that we operate services and how long we've been operating services of the company it's a very different mindset than operating package software then you look at when you think about some of the issues and very large scale cloud you can't learn some of those lessons until you get two different elbows of the curve and scale and so what I was telling you is it's really different to run your own platform for your own users where you get to tell them exactly how it's going to be done but that's nothing really the way the real world works I mean we have millions of external customers who use us from every imaginable country and location whenever they want without any warning for lots of different use cases and they have lots of design patterns and we don't get to tell them what to do and so operating a cloud like that at a scale that's several times larger the next few providers combined is a very different endeavor and a very different operating rigor well you got to keep raising the bar you guys do a great job really impress again another tsunami of announcements in fact you had to spill the beans early with quantum the day before the event tight schedule I gotta ask you about the music festival because I think there's a really cool innovation it's the inaugural intersex conference yeah it's not part of replay which is the concert tonight right it's a whole new thing big music act you're a big music buff your daughter's an artist why did you do this what's the purpose what's your goal yeah it's an experiment I think that what's happened is that reinvent has gotten so big with 65,000 people here that to do the party which we do every year it's like a thirty five forty thousand person concert now which means you have to have a location that has multiple stages and you know we thought about it last year when we were watching it and we said we're kind of throwing like a four hour music festival right now there's multiple stages and it's quite expensive to set up that set for our partying we said well maybe we don't have to spend all that money for four hours in the rip it apart because actually the rent to keep those locations for another two days is much smaller than the cost of actually building multiple stages and so we we would try it this year we're very passionate about music as a business and I think we are I think our customers feel like we throw in a pretty good music party the last few years and we thought we were trying at a larger scale as an experiment and if you look at the economics the headliners real quick the Foo Fighters are headlining on Saturday night Anderson Park and the free Nashville free Nationals Brandi Carlile Shawn Mullins Willie Porter it's a good set Friday night it's back in Kacey Musgraves so it's it's a really great set of about 30 artists and we're hopeful that if we can build a great experience that people want to attend that we can do it it's scale and it might be something that you know both pays for itself and maybe helps pay for reinvent to overtime and you know I think that we're also thinking about it as not just a music concert and festival the reason we named it intersect is that we want an intersection of music genres and people and ethnicities and age groups and art and Technology all there together and this will be the first year we try it it's an experiment and we're really excited about I'm gone congratulations all your success and I want to thank you we've been seven years here at reinvent we've been documenting the history two sets now once-dead upstairs so appreciate a cube is part of reinvent you know you guys really are a part of the event and we really appreciate your coming here and I know people appreciate the content you create as well and we just launched cube 365 on Amazon Marketplace built on AWS so thanks for letting us cool build on the platform appreciate it thanks for having me guys Jesse the CEO of AWS here inside the cube it's our seventh year covering and documenting they're just the thunderous innovation that Amazon is doing they're really doing amazing work building out the new technologies here in the cloud computing world I'm John Force too many men be right back with more after this short break [Music]

>> from Bahrain. It's the Q recovery AWS Public sector Bahrain brought to you by Amazon Web service is >> welcome to the cues conversation here. You're in Bahrain for Amazon Webster, is this summit our second summit? Um, here. Big news. Amazon Web services announced the availability of the region in the Middle East. I'm here with the chief of Public Sector Theresa Cross and vice President of Worldwide Public Sector. This is a huge milestone. This event one just in terms of the event. The interest across multiple countries in the region. Yes. And you have a new region with multiple availability zones? Yes, up and running. Congratulations. >> Hey, we launched the confetti today and yes, we're open for business and we do. It's a hyper scale region with three available the zones and lots of activity already here in the delays. But it really is a substantial kind of milestone because we started this sometime back in the Middle East, was one of the top regions around the world requested by our partners and customers. And now here we are. >> We've been talking with you for many, many years and I love interviewing you, but this one to me feels like it's not the weight off your shoulders. It's you're at the start line of another marathon. You've achieved so much with this because what's the first thing about Bart Rainey? We've reported on this on Select Angle and our other sites is that you get a lot of work here, is not just turning on a region. There's a lot of government commitment cloud first, full modernization, fintech banking systems, a full re platforming of a government and society and Amazons powering a lot of it and causing a lot of economic growth. So this is a big deal. >> It really is a big deal because, like you said, it really is about digital transformation here. And when I met the crown Prince in 2014 we had this conversation about really creating the economy here in a different way because Bob terrain itself, it's not oil rich country, but a smaller country with lots and lots of tourism. But in this region, while we haven't based here in Bahrain, this is truly a Middle East GCC region and but But part of that, the reason to start it here in my reign was that they really did take a lead in government transformation. As you heard them say, they're going all in shake Some on today talked about government is moving really fast, and they actually did the hard work to think about their telecommunications industry, their government regulations. They started with cloud first, and then they created all the write regulations to make this happen. So it is kind of phenomenal how quickly, in some ways, you know, feel slower than we'd like, But it's really moving quite fast. >> It's pretty fast. You should get a lot of kudos for that. I think you will. But I think to me what's interesting. The news here is that there is a balance between regulation and innovation going on, and regulation can be hampering innovation, some cases and not enough regulation. You have a Facebook situation or >> right so >> it's a balance. These guys have done it right. But to me, the tell sign is the fintech community, >> because that's where >> the money is. The central bank and then the ABC bank are all talking about a pea eye's all in with Amazon that's gonna create an ecosystem for innovation. Startups, et cetera. >> It totally isn't you heard Thean Vivid Jewel from ABC Bank today talk about their platform. What they're doing with clouds and the reason they chose a DBS was because we had this region of Bob Terrain, and they wanted to move quickly in. The regulations now have been updated in a way that actually allows them to do their banking applications in the lab. There's also a startup accelerator here, Fintech May, and they're doing a tenant work with new types of financial applications. So it's so exciting to see this kind of happening than the lace for I think a lot of people thought it would be much slower. We have a ways to go. It's still day one, for sure, but all the building blocks are getting there in the right place to really make this happen. >> You know, 80. Jessie's quoting the announcement you guys had just a couple weeks ago. Laura Angel And in July, the clouds of chance unlocked digital transmission. Middle East, says Andy chassis. Obviously unlocking is a key word because now you have customers from startups to large enterprises and ecosystem of a P M party. So the Ap N Group is here. Yes, So you have global I SUV's here and knew I s V's. You got the government and the education and to me, the news of the show. To me at least maybe it's not the big news, but is that you guys? They're offering a computer like a cloud computing degree. Yeah, for the first time about that news, >> you are right in terms of kind of every sector's picking at, but like in most places around the world, this is not unique. We need skills, and we've got to make sure that we're teaching the skills, working backwards from what the employer needs, like a TVs. So what? We've been here. We announced today we're launching our first cloud computing degree at the university of our terrain, and they're kind of thing. That's really unusual, John. They're going to do a phase one where they offer a cloud certification starting in early 2021 every program at the University of Bahrain, Whether you're in finance or banking, or business or health care or law, you can do this cloud computing certification, which gets you going and helps you understand how you last cloud in your business and then in the fall will be announcing the four year starting, the four year cloud computing degree, and that is in conjunction with our A DBS Educate program. And it will be all the right cloud skills that are needed to be successful. >> Talk about the demographics in this country because one of the things that's coming up is when I talk people in the doorways and it's a chance to talk to some local folks last night that that all in an Amazon, the theme is this. This younger generation yes, is here, and they have different expectations. They all want to work hard. They don't want to just sit back on their laurels and rest on their on their location. Here. They want to build companies they want to change. This is a key factor in the bottle rain modernization. Is that >> Yeah, generation well, all across the Middle East. The thing that's unique about the mill aces, the very young population you had millions of gamers across the Middle East as an example that comic con and Saudi like two years ago on that was one of the most popular things was fortnight. As soon as the region got at all the different gaming started taking place. But we want to create a culture of builders here, and the way you do that is what you said, John putting it into their hands, allowing these young people have the tools create a startup became entrepreneur, but they need to have access to these tools. And sometimes capital is often not that easy to get. So they want to make sure that the capital that they're given or that they have, whether it's bootstrap capital or venture capital, fending or whatever friends and family, they want to make sure that they can use that capital to the greatest advantage to build that company out. And I truly believe that this is gonna help them having an eight of us cloud region. I mean, you saw. Today we have 36 companies that launched their offering in the region on the day we actually announced so that they had specific offerings for the Middle East, which pretty exciting. I mean, that's a lot on day one. >> I mean, it's still day. One of you guys always say, but literally day one they were launching Yeah, I wanted to comment if you could just share some insights. I know, Um, your passion for, you know, entrepreneurship. You guys are also some skill development investing a lot of women in tech power panel this morning, there's major change going on. You guys were providing a lot of incentives, a lot of mentoring, this internships in conjunction with by rain. There's a lot of good things. Share some of the new things that you're working on, maybe deals you're talking about doing or >> way announced Thio kind of new things today. One is we have our we partake program, which I'm, of course, super passionate about. And that is about preventing tech learning and skills to women and underserved in representative communities. So we announced three other training programs here across the Middle East time. So those were put up today and you'll continue to see its role more and more of those out. And the other thing we did yesterday we announced a internship program with the minister of Youth here in Bahrain. That was shaped Nassir, who's a very famous He's that King san, and he's a very famous sportsmen. He does. He just won the Ironman Ironman and 2016. It was the world champion. He does endurance horse racing, so he's a He's a someone that the youth look at to here, and so he's doing all these programs. So we announced a partnership that were the first group doing the internship with this youth program, and so we're very excited. We're going to start that small and scale it, but we want to get these young people quickly and kind of get them excited. But here, what they focus on it is underrepresented communities. So it fits so nicely in with what we're doing with our attack. So you have both Oliver training our over 400 online courses that we offer with a dubious education academy. Now degree now our internship program and we protect. So, John, we're just getting going. I'm not saying that this is all will offer, but these are the things that were getting going with, and we need to make sure we also Taylor things like this Ministry of Youth program and sports at to the region in terms of water, their local needs, and we'll make sure that we're always looking >> at the entrance. Just just get him some great experience. Yes, so they can earn and feel good about themselves. This is kind of a key, exactly thing not just getting an internship, >> and it's, I think, locally it will be about teaching them to do that, disagree and commit really have that backbone to build that company and ask all those hard questions. So we're really going to try to indoctrinate them into the Amazon a TVs culture so we can help them be entrepreneurs like we are every day. >> And you got the data center, you got the city, the centers, you get the regions up and running, and architect, it perfectly suits up with people in it. Are you going to staff that with local talent, or is it gonna be Amazonian is coming in? What's the makeup of staff gonna be? What's the >> story? I mean, our goal is to hire as many local talent. We everywhere we go around the world. We want to get local talent because you can't yet if we did, First of all, we don't have enough people in our headquarters to bring folks in here, so we really have to train and educate. But locally, we have an office open here by rain. We haven't Office Open and Dubai and one down Saudi, and that is local talent. I mean, we are trying to use as much local talent and will continue to create that. And that's kind of the point. Jonas talking about the degree working backwards from what the employer needs. We want to give input because we think we also are getting good. Yeah, so we need to get the top. But we need those other individual employers that keep telling us we need more cloud skills to give that input. But, yeah, >> we're going to get a degree, migrate them into the job >> market, right quick like >> and educates. Been doing great. I learned a lot. This is a whole opportunity for people who want to make money, get a job. Amazon Web service is >> It's a place you could either work for us. Work for someone now, like even the government has a >> virus. Make a person tomorrow >> there. Yet >> we had one, >> but the point of being a builder, what we're seeing more and more John are these companies and government entities are building their talent internally. They're not outsourcing everything anymore, and the whole culture at being a builder, not just outsourcing all that. And that's what eight of us really helps all these entities. D'oh is moved quicker by having kind of some in house talent and not outsourcing everything to slow you down. That >> really thank ABC pointed that out beautifully in his point was, Hey, I'm gonna you know, I'm all in on AWS. We have domain expertise, We have data. That's our intellectual property. We're going to use that and be competitive and partner. And >> yes, and the new models it is. And that I p stays in house with that company or entity or government organization. It was so fun for me today to hear Shake some on from Maggie. A talk about the government is moving fast, and I think that's an example of a really are they figured out clown helps him just go a lot faster and save many security. >> I'm glad you brought that up. I know you got a short time here, but I want one last point in. We've been talking a lot about modernization of government, your success with C i a United States jet I contract still under consideration. All this going on you're experiencing by ranges and, um, unbelievable, fast moving government. They kind of get it. United States some places gets it. This is really about focusing in on the workloads. What have you learned? As you've been engaging these modernization efforts with governments summer slow, some of political ramifications behind. No one wants to lose. Old guard will hold onto the rails. We've seen that in the news, but this is coming fast. What are you learning? What do you >> take away its leadership? I mean, at the end of the day, all these things were driven by a very strong leaders. And even you can see everybody today on stage. It is leaders that make a decision that they wanted a faster and they want to modernize but have the capabilities. No matter if you're the U. S. Department of Defense. Ah, yes. Health and human resource is National Health Service in the UK or RG a hearing by rain, the government's or enterprises that we work with around the world. The key is leadership. And if there's that leader that is really strong and says we're moving, did you actually see organizations move a lot faster if you see people kind of waffle anger. I'm not sure, you know, that's when you can see the slowness. Wow, What I will tell you is from the early days of starting this business in 2010 the individuals that always move fastest for the mission owners because the mission owners of whatever the business West at a governmental level or enterprise, they said, we need to keep our mission going. So that's the reason they wanted to walk through this transformation. >> And now, I think, with developers coming in and started to see these employees for these companies saying, No, no, what's the reason why we can't go fast? That's right now a groundswell of pressure you see in both government, public sector and commercial. >> And you saw Mark Allen today on stage talking about security. It iss literally day. Zero thing for us, and the reason a lot of our customers are meeting faster now is because of security. Cloud is more secure in their meeting to the cloud for security because they feel like they could both optimize, move faster for workloads, and now they have security. Better, faster, cheaper security, bad design, >> Theresa always pleasure thinking coming. Spending time. Thank >> you for coming to Barbara Ryan. Thank you. So >> we're going global with you guys is seeing the global expansion 20 to 22nd region. 69 availabilities owns nine more coming. More regions. More easy. You guys doing great. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Secure. We are here in Bahrain. Form or coverage. Global coverage of the cube with Reese Carlson, vice president of worldwide public sector. She's running the show doing a great job. We're here more after the stroke break. Stay with us.

>> live from Washington, D. C. It's the Cube covering a ws public sector summit I wrote to you by Amazon Web services. Welcome >> back, everyone. You are watching the Cube and we are here in our nation's capital at the A. W s Public sector summit. I'm your host, Rebecca Night hosting alongside John Furrier. We're joining Cuba LEM Doug Van Dyke, CEO of Inquisitor to our show. Thanks so much for coming back on. >> Well, thank you for having me back. It's good to be here. >> So as I said, You're a Cuba LEM. You're also a nails on alum. And there's a story there, so >> we'll just do a quick rehash of last year. So I started a day ws in 2,012 with the federal business helped the federal business grow started. The eight of US nonprofit Vertical was invited by John and in stew last year to be on the Cube. The video is a great discussion. The video is seen by some of our best partners and inquisitor who happens to be one of the best partners that I had in public sector. We started some discussions and later I was hired to be the CEO. So, John, >> thank you. I didn't know this was >> going to be a career opportunity >> for you. You're the one who's got the jobs. You through the interviews? Well, political, absolutely appreciated community. Great to have you on. Good. Thank you. Thank you for meeting with Theresa. You've known Therese for many, many years. Microsoft Public Sector Game is certainly on fire. You got Andy chassis on the fireside chat. Kind of bring in. You see the frustration like he's got problems and he's never known any for many, many years. For him to be that animated with his opinion means that it's critical more more than ever. Now, where is public sector opportunity right now? Because it seems to be clouds validated, are we? There is just a turning moment for the whole public sector community, >> yet we're so we're absolutely seeing that and inquisitive fact inquisitor. One of the things I like most about inquisitor is it is focused exclusively on the public sector, so our background is in education. If you know, a student is graduating from high school now and applying to one of the many colleges and universities they use the common application We worked with the common app to help build that system that graduating students can apply to multiple universities as opposed to when I was a graduating high school student, had to fill out the form, send in a check, wait for it to come back in the mail. Now that's all done online. You can apply to multiple colleges at the same time. So I look at that as one of the first innovations that happened in the public sector on a ws inquisitor was a part of it. It was one of the things that attracted me to inquisitor, but the innovations that was in two thousand 92 1,010 it was the beginning. We are just hitting that hockey stick that Andy has talked about in public sector, where you know, the federal business. You talked a little bit about the Intel business and how when the agency moved onto a ws, it really validated security. I think we've seen the government go in. I think we've seen education and nonprofits, so I think this is the time that public sector is really going to take off in the clouds >> about the company that you're leading is the chief now, and the product is using common app. You tell what the common app that my high school's graduates had to fill out. Okay, it's send okay. Is that it? >> That's it. That's it. So I >> got some issues with this thing. >> So follow up that was >> definitely on love on different you. Heavy lifting when filling out applications. Automate is great, but it increases the MAWR schools you can apply to, so creates more inbound applications to schools. It does. I'm sure there's some challenges there that's on the horizon with you guys is solving them that creates more. I won't say span because this legit, but a lot of schools are like people throwing in 17 applications now. 20 applications. >> Well, it's automated. I >> mean technology. So, yes, there's more automation, but there's more background. There's more data and these surgeries going on database decision. So sure we'll let me start with inquisitor. You asked about inquisitive 2,000 to quiz it's started and doing application development. It was in two thousand nine that we really saw the light to move Teo a Ws, and it was through the work that we were doing with the common app that we realised the scale of handling all these applications, that the paper based way isn't an easier. In fact, it really restricts the number of colleges that students can apply, and it restricts the number of applicants that colleges get. So with more students applying to more universities and universities receiving more applications, they can be really selective. They have more data sources, more information aboutthe people. They're going to bring on and have a very inclusive and representative university. We have students applying from China and Europe, too, United States University. So we're getting a lot of diversity, and I think you know, there's probably a little bit more volume, but that's what technology >> today is the first digital data. So that's why I appreciate that. But there's gotta be more automation machine learning going in because now you have a relationship with a student and a school. What, what's next? What happens next? >> Well, it's so Sky's the limit, and you can do once you've got data. So data reporting is basically limited by the quality of the input data. So you have more students applying with more background information, and you could get really personal. So we helped a large Ivy League university in the Northeast migrate all into a ws. And this was after we worked with common app to build the common application way helped this university migrate all into a ws and we realized that there were benefits and challenges along the way. Some of the challenges we saw were repeatable, so we built a proprietary product called Sky Map. And what sky map does is it helps the full migration. So it integrates with your discovery applications like a risk network. It integrates with a ws cloud endure and we were working with cloud endure before a ws acquired them. So we have a p I's there, it manages the whole migration. And your question was, you get all this information about an organization's infrastructure, what do you do with it? Will use the next up is a M l. So we've used some of the higher level services that a bit Amazon Web services has with artificial intelligence. We were using Lambda Server lis and we could go there because I think that's and you've >> got to hand over their 80 must educate. >> Oh, yeah, >> you know, you're great. Get a common app over there. Any university coming soon >> I would Did he mention that I saw he was >> on the show before? >> And I just think that it was You got a huge inbound educational thing going on. So education seems to be a big part of the whole themes here. >> Well, that's our legacy, and we're working with a lot of universities were seeing. So you asked, Where is the cloud going? And in the future, we're seeing large universities move all in on a WS because of they're going to get more flexibility. The costs are going to go down. They're going to have more information on the students. They're going to be able to provide better learning. >> When you're talking to your client of this this big Ivy league in the Northeast, what are its pain points? Because I mean, college admissions is a controversial topic in the United States, and its been there's been scandal this year. What? When? When you were talking with this company and they said, Well, we want to do this. But what was the problem they were trying to solve? I mean, what what were they? What were their pain points. >> Well, one of the first pain points is they were located in a major city and their data center was in the major city. And this is expensive real estate. And so to use expensive real estate that you for date us, you know, for servers, etcetera for data center instead of using it for education is a cost to the university. So very simply put, moving out of that data center opening that space up for education and moving into a ws cloud saved it gave them more space for education. It helped them with cost avoidance, and way had a bunch of lessons learned along the way. So way at the time could move about five servers a week, which may seem like a good number. But now, with the automation that we get through sky map our product, we're working with the large a group of private universities as well as Wharton University. And with this large group of private universities, we found we could do on average over 20 the best week we had 37 servers migrate, hire >> a housefly. They like to be on the cutting edge, but still there public sector. Where's the modernisation Progress on that? Because now you're you've been on both sides of the table. You were Amazon Web services. Now years leading is the CEO of this company in higher ed. How's that modernization going? What's your perspective? What's your observation around? >> Sure, So you know. First of all, I had the opportunity to go work it with the university that's local here last week. And what I love seeing is with this access to the cloud you've got, everyone in the university now has access to nearly unlimited resource is for education. They were staffing their own help desk with their students. And I love seeing that kind of experience being brought from, You know, someone who used to be an IT professional is now being brought down to a student because of thes new technologies are so readily accessible to everybody. >> So so what's that? Tell us some other things that you're seeing that you're hearing. They're they're exciting innovations to you in the in the sector. >> Yeah, well, another opportunity that were working with is we worked with the Small Business Administration, and that was pretty rewarding. For us is a small business and three of the applications that we worked on their were. So we are a small a day, and it used to take our founder TC Ratna pur e about two months. Oh, and we had to hire an outside consultant to apply for our small business accreditation. So he was doing the paperwork and all the, you know, the old school application certification. After we built this application with the Small Business Administration, it took him several hours. He did it by himself. We applied. Got the accreditation. So thes modernizations air happening both in universities as well as in the federal government. >> So what's your business plan? You're the CEO now. What's the company's plan? Which your goals. >> So there's so many things I could talk about ill talk about one or two. We see in the next 1 2 3 to 5 years in public sector that these organizations are going to migrate all in on the cloud. And so we're building up a group. That's what Sky map is mainly addressing is way. Want to make sure that organizations are able tto orchestrate their move to the cloud and we're using? We're going to start exposing the tool that we use for our own internal resource is we're gonna start exposing that, leaving that with universities in the federal government and anyone else who's willing to use it to help them get all in on the cloud. Then we think there's probably going to be a wave where they're trying. Teo, learn the cloud and howto operate It will help them is a manage service provider. And then where I'm excited is you go to server lists and I mentioned were already using Lambda for our sky map product that we see in the future after the M S P V organisations. They're going to be servant lis and they'll be running into no ops environments. >> The classic example of sometimes you your business evolves areas you don't know based off on the wave You're on you guys, we're very proficient at migrating We are now You got sky map which is you're gonna take that those learnings and pay it forward bringing >> that are bringing them to the market that >> we don't have to do that themselves by build kind of thing. >> Well, and it's a little bit like you're doing here, John. And what a ws >> is the only one I get up. I tell everybody that, like >> a ws did eight of us start is away for Amazon to manage their internal servers. And, you know, eventually they realized everyone else in the market can use thes same innovations that they've got. And, >> well, I think this proves the point that if you assassin based model with open AP eyes, you Khun offer and pretty much anything is a service. If you get the speed and agility equation right, someone might say why she is not a court company. Why should I buy? I'll just use that service. I hope so. It's the sad, small hopes up. >> Yeah, and sorry. >> I was going to say you were on the inside. Now you're on the outside of that. This conference. What are your impressions? What are you What kind of conversations are you having that you are going to take back to inquisitor and say, Hey, I learned this at the summit. Are these people over here working on something cool? We got to get this in >> here. Well, it's been really fun for me is a change of perspective. For the last seven years, I've been helping plan and organize the event. Make sure it >> goes off this time. I'm a guest. You know, e I look a little bit >> more relaxed than last year is because, you know, I'm a guest now, but the takeaways are really You know, the innovation is continuing at A W s. And, you know, as a partner of Amazon Web services, I've got to make sure that my team and I stay up to date with all of the services that are being released and simplify those. And, like John was asking earlier, you know, make sure that there's a strategy for migration support and then continuing to re factor what they're doing. >> Well, congratulations on the new job. Get a great tale. When, with cloud growth adoption just early days, public sector continuing toe astonished with numbers. Next, she'll be 38,000 people. A lawsuit is like reinvent size, only 30,000 people. >> This is huge. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm sure you guys are enjoying it as well. >> Yeah, I know. It's been great, Doug. Thanks so much for returning to the Q B. I your two time >> alone. Thank you. Thank >> you. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have more from the Amazon, Uh, a ws public sector, something coming up in just a little bit.

[Music] everyone welcome to the special cube conversation here to talk about the big announcements big news big concepts and big trends happening Cisco live in Barcelona I'm John for your host of the cube we're here with Fabio Gauri senior director cloud solution marketing at Cisco I've been great to see you things are spending time to me to unpack all the exciting news in Barcelona great stuff thank you thank you for having me John so one of the things that's happening with Cisco we've covered certainly we've been reporting and reporting are other outlets as well and you guys have been transforming and continuing to innovate Cisco has transformed itself into the next level building on your successes we've been covering that and that's been all about the clouds been all about networking going you know software driven you know software powered network operations DevOps the whole thing is now infiltrating into into the new model but it's clear now there's no debate that on-premise data centers on-premise environments of IT service providers the entire old you know computing industry is connecting with the cloud that's been kind of validated and we've been staring at that for a couple of years and now everyone's starting to take action this is a key theme here in Barcelona for you guys and we heard you see you talking about it last year at Cisco live in North America that transition to cloud validated across the voice or Andy chassis the CEO of AWS actually announced an on-premise device hybrid cloud has been validated so public cloud and on-premise and now visibility into what kubernetes is enabled with multi cloud mm-hmm this is the new normal describe that impact in the marketplace what does it mean for customers what do they do what what is it what does this mean when now enterprises are seeing on-premise and cloud coming together absolutely well you know if you think about it you gotta start from the application so if you take a step back right we've been talking about digitization for so long but what does that ultimately mean right people need to build more and more applications to digitize their their business processes their customer experience and so on and so forth ultimately what we're seeing is that this applications are becoming exceptionally distributed right because they go what it makes sense whatever the data is whatever the user is you may have low latency needs you may have actually just you know the right needs to go all the way to the cloud in reality you have a mix of this kind of needs but workloads are distributed and people want to harness this multi cloud world and that's what we're seeing I love these chips it's kind of like people have been living on two sides of the street you know old way new way it's clear that the migration to this new model cloud is the new way and that's been validated again so you've got the old way in new way describe in your mind the old way and the new way from Cisco because if you look at the history of Cisco the dominance and the success I had and recently had an opportunity to be John Chambers at his house and he talked about that that dynamic of how Cisco is so dominant the culture and then going the next level the datacenter you guys have a great success networking edge this is New York or business yeah that's still relevant with the cloud in the new way so talk about what's changed all the way new way Francisco I'll give you a try so fundamentally if you if you if you remember where we're coming from we are coming from an era where we've been seeing infrastructure kind of dictating application requirements through the other way around as well but you had an application you will buy specific hardware networking and everything else including firewalls for a specific infrastructure right so that era actually is not going away is there because it's built an immense amount of legacy that you can not all of a sudden throw away however the new world is a world where you see applications fundamentally going pretty much across multiple type of domains not just to do the center domain anymore but here comes the cloud we have a lot of applications that are going to the edge if you have a branch office right you may want to take your application over there because it's simpler it's it's sometimes it's more economic you don't need to move all the data and still you can have those applications collaborating with your data center with your cloud so what you're now seeing is a completely from world where applications want the infrastructure to be programmable and easy accessible and still extremely secure that's interesting in the old way was you know the you dictate applications you can only do as much as the network and the infrastructure will let you to do yeah and then now as infrastructure becomes more abundant yeah data tsunamis have spent a lot of data's coming in so that's why the storage industry never docking it's always growing storage industries always growing servers as always need for compute but as is more abundance than that it almost as a limitless opportunity for applications so it's not a you know kill the old and bring in the new it's more of a foundational hold as now foundational it is literally next level thing so kubernetes service meshes these programmable policy-based abstractions are showing the way and that's a network construct policy is a network concert so the first time we're seeing is the coming together of the app market with infrastructure absolutely and if you think about it even a step before the apps people have when they build application they have a business intent right let's make an example you take healthcare application right you want in a hospital you want the doctors to be able to access you know the full extent of the data of a customer record for instance you may not want the nurses doing the same thing or for instance you don't want the nurses and the doctors to get access to the financial system of the hospital so this is actually a business intent that that given application will have to respect well the infrastructure can and has to cope with this kind of requirements by delivering the appropriate kind of segmentation right so that you'll be able to ensure that what the application wants to do the infrastructure delivers what has changed in the on premise and cloud world in your mind because to have that kind of coordination and you guys are have announced here it's some great announcements around seamless end-to-end as a theme we're seeing you're seeing hyper convergence anywhere are you seeing application centric infrastructure concepts everywhere but when you actually go into the hood and look at how complex it is it's almost magical in the sense that it's going on its I know it's hard work and people who know networking know it's hard what are the innovations what's enabling that what is the key driver that's making you guys connect an on-premise data complex data center environment that is now edges private networks hybrid private cloud IOT edge enterprise edge campuses the old stuff now with cloud what are the key linchpins well hey I'm gonna take on one of the the words that you use complexity people are looking for the opposite of complexity people are looking for simplicity easy to say more difficult to do but what sits between complexity and and and turning it into a more simple kind of architecture is automation so what you have to have is fundamentally an infrastructure that becomes automated programmable that takes the business intent or the application intent as an input and actually with a closed-loop system fundamentally monitors and gives you the assurance okay the implementation the assurance that actually what you want to do gets delivered by the infrastructure and this has to be literally annalistic and cross-domain kind of architecture what do I mean with cross-domain you're going out of the data center you're going out to the edge you're now going to the cloud this should be seen as a cohesive almost fluid environment where you can actually push your policy your security models right and transform in this highly fragmented the architecture into a set of domains or a multi domain architecture that you can control that you can automate as if it was all yours so to speak even though in the cloud for instance you're going into a domain that you don't control end-to-end so big concept here being discussed in Barcelona is multi domain you just get that explain that a little bit and then take that to where cloud integration comes in because the other thread that we're seeing here is multi cloud yeah so multi domain multi-cloud the same are they different what's the nuance points there yeah again the the critical point is let's think applications applications want to go and it's convenient to go into multiple domains right depending on what you want to do what you want to access to you wanna access clouds innovation from whatever they come from so that's why we have a multi cloud world the data center is still there is critically important you have a lot of applications databases that are still there and now we're seeing the big new shiny object which which is more and more super Robo remote office branch office applications where for instance IDC believes 30% of applications are going to be deployed into this kind of environments so your problem is now connecting all of this together right and because the applications are going anywhere are the designer strategy is that the data center needs to follow the applications and support them wherever they go so it's a data center anywhere kind of kind of strategy the data center has to flex and provide that yes be ready for anything basically from from applications what you're getting at and all the all the plumbing and all the all the intelligence underneath it have to be reactive to what the application wants absolutely a vocation doesn't have to get into the provisioning or any kind of policy because that's the infrastructure as code DevOps the point is that that kind of absolutely the application has an intent right there's also application policy etcetera but it needs to be translated into infrastructure policy where we've been talking about it a minute ago when we were doing the the healthcare kind of example right well we've been super excited in collaborating with you guys on kubernetes we have a special section on silicon angle called the kubernetes special report that's evolving into multi cloud special reports the folks watching Silicon angle comm check out the multi classify syrup or that should be up and yeah by now it was the COO Bernays but ton of interest was seeing startups coming out of the kubernetes you're seeing a cloud native world CN CF and Linux foundation promoting tons of great ecosystem development pulling together those developers want more infrastructure and so that and they wouldn't want to deal with it right so this is where you the cloud strategy has been paying off for you guys you guys have had done deals with Google as your AWS s ap Red Hat among others you guys are well poised for this talk about cloud Center that's a big piece of the story here yeah cloud Center suite a new capabilities talk about the impact of cloud and cloud Center yeah so let me let me let me take us the buck if you want and tell you a little bit more about what we're announcing here right because it's a pretty big announcement I mentioned at the center anywhere what does it mean right well of course our data center portfolio is sent around two big components the first one is networking right particular application center came first structure a CI based on the Nexus 9 K kind of architecture and the second one is our computing portfolio particularly you know the hyper-converged infrastructure cisco hyper flex that's of course you know an extremely efficient way of condensing you know what you need to make it very flexible in your application implementation where we have two major news here right in this two areas and the third is absolutely what you were asking for which is Cloud Center so with a CI and it's interesting because they're going into two if you want different directions when it comes to the small T cloud domain AC I was already visualized in the previous releases sorry application centric infrastructure is fundamentally cisco in ten base networking for the data center okay it gives you program ability of the infrastructure it gives you segmentation gives you security and a high degree of automation capabilities exactly okay continue and so in the previous in the previous if you want developments releases of ACI what we've been doing was to aggressively visualize a CI right so that you will have constructs like virtual poles and virtual leaves to rescale your data center implementation to the edge now where we're going with this new announcement is exactly on the other side which is we're standing ACI to the cloud to usher in AWS so that the construct that you have typically on Prem under your control such as tenants EP G's and things of this nature will be translated into the equivalent construct in AWS whether it's VP C's or security groups and the likes the two things end up fundamentally corresponding so now we have one construct that extends from the edge to the data center to the cloud that's a pretty big deal and what does that mean to the customer just give an example it means a high degree of automation security and control on the resources right so that you can impose one policy it propagates all across the board one way of monitoring you know the data center flows and discovering for instance if you have if you have any kind of security threat monitoring application performance thanks to the inter so this fully checks this hybrid cloud box this ship I say yes is one a hybrid deployment this checks the box saying I can operate and say whatever cloud and on-premise in the datacenter with a CI both places without changing any code is it seamless what's the what's that well with a CI is gonna come with a specific software this is all software that's that's the beauty of it right it's it's in line with the transformation the company that you were referring to it's all software and it goes into AWS and uses of course all the api's to connect 2d to the AWS resources that you were you're you're acquiring from AWS right so that's one big bucket of news the second bucket o news is hyper flex that's actually heading to the edge because what we're seeing is more and more applications that have components of the application itself or even entire applications that are going into remote office branch offices and the reason are many right it could be cost reason it could be did a gravity reason it could be just low latency reason right we all know that you know to go back and forth from the cloud that's not always convenient as well as if you lose the connectivity your branch is dead right so you have to you need to have business continue it in all of this and so it doesn't mean that you don't want the cloud you want a collaboration across this again fluid sort of infrastructure so I purflex come with a very efficient kind of kind of fun factor over there now it's either flex edge and its control Emilia this is that because you have many remote offices and branch offices is controlled from the cloud with cisco inter side which is of course our console and cloud system to manage all these hand points no just hyper flex but also UCS so when you think of this now you understand what do we mean with the dissenter anywhere because we're taking both our networking and our computing platforms anywhere the application needs them right and the third component which actually is where your questions started from is application lifecycle management in this kind of infrastructure becomes even more of a problem right it is extremely complicated now to have applications in multiple clouds and then in your data center and to the in India JH and in you know all these different kind of places so what we've done with cloud center which is our flagship club management and an orchestration system is two big things first we have expanded the functionalities by adding new modules especially the cause optimizer the helps operations team at Center suite now it's the cloud center suite and I'll explain you in a moment why we remove the branding slightly from cloud center to cloud center suite because we highly modularize the software and and make it and made it really much more easy to consume I'll go there in a moment but going back to what is new first of all is cost optimizer right that's that's brand new and it helps Operations team to right-size the workload to pick up the the best instances in the cloud are you using to actually minimize your investment or reach your your goal of performance and cost right that's one big thing the second one is that we're adding a very smart so called action Orchestrator which is a workflow manager that helps you automate in there tear connection of your cloud management system to all the other systems right some of these plugins and integrations come outer-box particularly with the higher level tiers of licensing such as with service now for instance or we give you already built-in integration with cisco inter side or UCS director which is the infrastructure manager for Cisco infrastructure but you can use the kind of platform and module to build your own integrations with the other systems that's very important because the cloud management system doesn't exist in isolation right it needs to integrate with all the other IT management solution that you have on Prem and that's one big thing the second big thing as you said before when you said about the suite is the fact that because we have written all of this new software and cuber Nerys right this is highly scalable highly portable so now we can give you different tiers of licenses you can start very small as small as around $50,000 right for subscription service and you can actually bite subscription on pram or that's big news you can buy Nate software-as-a-service so cloud center is now Asaf offering yes available when it's gonna be so all the subscription use the new software is going to be available literally a next month in a few days for now right in February and the SAS version is gonna be available in North America in March so right away for Europe of course due to the GDP our implementation our customers will have to wait until the summer but it's pretty immediate and you hear a bit of an extra work done yeah okay so bottom line me on the cloud Center suite what is the the purpose is it to be the high level management suite how is it connecting into other systems so if I have all these different management tools out there when Cisco and others is it connecting into am i connecting up and you just explain quickly you know the purpose of it yeah works so really the goal of Cloud Center is to do a salute three things the first one is a he wants to simplify cloud management and how it does it right one of the key patents that we acquire together we clicker right click a cloud center when we brought them in more than two years ago was the really unique way that they have to model applications right the way that people are managing cloud management and an organization is still extremely manual I mean many customers are still kind of doing scripting we have cases of customers that are scripting like 1200 lines of codes just to upload a piece of software onto the cloud we think the approach should be different right the approach should be you should be able to model that application your application model wants and then thanks to cloud API so we have 16 different API into a cloud integrations with AWS our Google you name it right I BM and the likes we realize of course on parameter private cloud once you model your application you can use any of these other clouds as a target for implementation okay that allows you to have a very very effective cloud management solution because don't risk to make mistakes you leave the tool so you said it's written in kubernetes absolutely we scraped all this now we program all this in Cuban Eddie's so you may tell us hey you're walking the talk absolutely doing that and that's very in that sow actually we can do it on Prem in a Cuban IT infrastructure by the way if you need one we have the Cisco cloud center platform a hyper flex underneath to do it or you can buy from the cloud because we're uploading a little dot to the cloud you guys have done a good job at kubernetes just as a side note you guys done the work it's doing the cloud integrations and I think wasn't she about kubernetes unlike other trends I've seen in some of these open-source projects some hype comes up and then it kind of drops off or it gets hyped up and it's too hard to roll out or use it cost too much and so people actually using kubernetes for not just standing it up they're actually pulling it for a purpose so congratulations on that I think it's a real good thank you for thank you know we're a big believer in to this so simplifying really multiplayer management is one big thing reducing time to value is another big thing because with the integrations and the ability you know to integrate with the other tools you can put it in production very very quickly and then it's incredibly easy to consume you can start small and grow up so I did a little checklist here I want to just run this by you and then I'm going to ask you a question around what all this means to your to your customer base because I'm sure the world's changing we've done a lot of kind of you know surveys and interaction with a lot of network guys to kind of spiel out how the markets going get your reaction so interesting thing you guys have a this builder model very similar to Amazon you know toolkits for cloud builders you guys are really investing heavily and it's a security you got stealthWatch tetration analytics you've got app dynamics and tetration as well datacenter hyper flex UCS Nexus check cloud apps WebEx I know what else is in there there's also cloud apps cloud native apps which you're connecting into management cloud center container platform and IOT kinetic and networking the edge Meraki cloud service route or bunch of other things so you guys are building quite the portfolio on here right so given that you guys have that security to network and kind of end-to-end with the application centric infrastructure are kind of expanding and intent based networking combined cloud seems to be kind of the end-to-end is the theme it really is it's it's again end to end and across multiple domains because that's the thing that doesn't come across with end to end is the fact that you need to cross different domains that are exceptionally different from from each other and so having consistent policies and a single security model having one mean of networking and securing all this in a containerized world which which is where we're progressively going that's everything and you know it's not me saying it but if you look at the CN CF surveys they'll tell you the securing and working containers is one of the toughest things so I got to ask you that the tough question totally makes sense you got my buy-in on it I totally believed in the vision making it work okay making it smart and making it at scale are the three kind of things I'm looking at give us your take on how you guys are looking at those three kind of you know checkpoints you got to get this up and running so one make it work you know end-to-end mobile domains yeah make it intelligent that's data smarter you know automation kicks in and I'll see scaling it up but you know with all the checkbox security everything else so take us through the strategy yeah and what you guys are thinking there and and the impact with that in mind so the person on the other side your customer the buyer and customer Sisko to manage it that's that's a big sea change yeah and the benefits are pretty lucrative on the other side if you can pull this up yeah yeah upon three big aspects so first of all we mean we've been talking about architectures but architectures doesn't mean that you shouldn't have Best of Breed products right it starts from there those are the atomic components of any strategy right you gotta have best of the products now these products need to integrate into an architecture that solves true business problems such as the intent base you know architecture that we've been talking about the third aspect is actually how you help customers to be successful and I will love to call out our partner strategy right which for I would say for as long as 30 years has been Cisco's critical differentiator and I think this is an enormous asset especially when you look at the number one problem in IT out there which is not kubernetes and it's no cloud is actually lack of talent people don't have the skillset and talents so relying on an ecosystem that helps you expanding what you need because you don't have it inside its fundamental importance on you guys absolutely but this is a critical asset and you know we're doing a lot of investments also on the customer experience side of the house with our leader Maria Martinez the staking actually this customer experience so approach to the next level more and more it's about these architectures also being cloud a touch so you heard me talking about inter-site it doesn't come by chance right the more you can rely on on this kind of architectures the more you can harvest analytics you can do cross correlation across multiple networks and domains and figure out what is going wrong that's something that providers of pinpoint products just cannot even dream of delivering as final question for first of all thanks for spending the time and chatting and he was going to be rolling out a lot of content we're gonna be following what's going on with on your end to really like Cisco's vibe you guys are very transparent and collaborating appreciate being there working with you guys final question if someone's watching this I'm a Cisco customer you know we've been talking about the network I which I've talked to a couple you know and surveying some some enterprises where you know the network's they've done the heavy lifting that's been part of the computing industry you know networking compute they've been running the show and really have moved the needle campus networking the list goes on and on but now that foundation set we're going to a whole nother level it's almost like a sea change on the personality side persona of the people who've built it out and now have to build the next generation yeah and my relevant am I gonna be the mainframe guy am I gonna be leading the charge or may be left behind there's a lot of cognitive dissidence around decisions so that go here should I go there architectures so there's a lot of psychology and also decision-making that's gonna be determined by your core audience mm-hmm that person out there is your target audience they're thinking about these things because they want to do well and they don't wanna be left behind what do you say to that audience about Cisco now the opportunity for them personally their ability to one grow their skill gaps or have an impact to being a key change agent for this next generation what do you say that that person out there about the Cisco and the opportunity for them it's it's a very big question I would split a question in two parts first of all is what is your advice to IT professionals right how can they not just survive but thrive and be the heroes of this this transition and it's pretty simple actually you have to understand what your business wants we've been talking about how do you close this gap between of infrastructure and application but in other terms is covering the gap between what you do and what the business wants you've got to understand that right so that's number one second part of the question is okay considering this is cisco the right partner for me and the answer of course from cisco standpoint is approximately yes because our entire company strategy is wrapped around this concept of intent-based architecture where our goal is to map the business intent into the infrastructure underneath and that's exactly your core business mr. IT professional right so I see this as a as a marriage in heaven right in terms of where I see really the talent need for IT going right in IT professionals and where the company is going right if we if we're right and I think we are this is gonna be a great ride and not a threatening one I think everything's lining up you're getting clear visibility into what the role of cloud is the scale PC and personal links are just undeniable and that the role of technologists now are super important there's no jobs really going away they're shifting this is this is the reality this is kind of what the exciting opportunity it is but but again it's about bringing IT very close to the business in the end I believe it's just it's just gonna be continuity between what we call today line of business and IT it's just a company that wants to win in the marketplace right wants to get faster efficient usual kind of you know terminology but you know does this gap is gonna go away Fabio thank you for taking the time to share this conversation I'm John furry this is a cube conversation here at Barcelona live go live Europe back to the cube coverage go to the cube dotnet to check out all the live coverage and cube interviews in Barcelona I'm here with Fabio Korey senior director cloud solutions marking Cisco I'm John for the cube thanks for watching [Music] you

[Music] when welcome to the special exclusive cube conversation here in Palo Alto in our studios I'm John for your host of the cube we have a very special guest speaking for the first time around some alleged alleged accusations and also innuendo around the Amazon Web Services Jedi contract and his firm c5 capital our guest as Andre Pienaar who's the founder of c5 capital Andre is here for the first time to talk about some of the hard conversations and questions surrounding his role his firm and the story from the BBC Andre thanks for a rat for meeting with me John great to have me thank you so you're at the center of a controversy and just for the folks who know the cube know we interviewed a lot of people I've interviewed you at Amazon web sources summit Teresa Carl's event and last year I met you and bought a rein the work you're doing there so I've met you a few times so I don't know your background but I want to drill into it because I was surprised to see the BBC story come out last week that was basically accusing you of many things including are you a spy are you infiltrating the US government through the Jedi contract through Amazon and knowing c-5 capital I saw no correlation when reading your article I was kind of disturbed but then I saw I said a follow-on stories it just didn't hang together so I wanted to press you on some questions and thanks for coming in and addressing them appreciate it John thanks for having me so first thing I want to ask you is you know it has you at the center this firm c5 capital that you the founder of at the center of what looks like to be the fight for the big ten billion dollar DoD contract which has been put out to multiple vendors so it's not a single source deal we've covered extensively on silicon angle calm and the cube and the government the government Accounting Office has ruled that there are six main benefits of going with a sole provider cloud this seems to be the war so Oracle IBM and others have been been involved we've been covering that so it kind of smells like something's going along with the story and I just didn't believe some of the things I read and I want to especially about you and see five capitals so I want to dig into what the first thing is it's c5 capital involved in the Jedi contract with AWS Sean not at all we have absolutely no involvement in the Jedi contract in any way we're not a bidder and we haven't done any lobbying as has been alleged by some of the people who've been making this allegation c5 has got no involvement in the general contract we're a venture capital firm with a British venture capital firm we have the privilege of investing here in the US as a foreign investor and our focus really is on the growth and the success of the startups that we are invested in so you have no business interest at all in the deal Department of Defense Jedi contract none whatsoever okay so to take a minute to explain c5 firm I read some of the stories there and some of the things were intricate structures of c5 cap made it sound like there was like a cloak-and-dagger situation I want to ask you some hard questions around that because there's a link to a Russian situation but before we get to there I want to ask you explain what is c5 capital your mission what are the things that you're doing c5 is a is a British venture capital firm and we are focused on investing into fast-growing technology companies in three areas cloud computing cyber security and artificial intelligence we have two parts our business c5 capital which invests into late stage companies so these are companies that typically already have revenue visibility and profitability but still very fast-growing and then we also have a very early stage startup platform that look at seed state investment and this we do through two accelerators to social impact accelerators one in Washington and one in Bahrain and it's just size of money involved just sort of order magnitude how many funds do you have how is it structure again just share some insight on that is it is there one firm is there multiple firms how is it knows it work well today the venture capital business has to be very transparent it's required by compliance we are a regulated regulated firm we are regulated in multiple markets we regulated here in the US the sec as a foreign investor in london by the financial conduct authority and in Luxembourg where Afonso based by the regulatory authorities there so in the venture capital industry today you can't afford to be an opaque business you have to be transparent at all levels and money in the Western world have become almost completely transparent so there's a very comprehensive and thorough due diligence when you onboard capital called know your client and the requirements standard requirement now is that whenever you're onboard capital from investor you're gonna take it right up to the level of the ultimate beneficial ownership so who actually owns this money and then every time you invest and you move your money around it gets diligence together different regulators and in terms of disclosure and the same applies often now with clients when our portfolio companies have important or significant clients they also want to know who's behind the products and the services they receive so often our boards our board directors and a shell team also get diligence by by important clients so explain this piece about the due diligence and the cross country vetting that goes on is I think it's important I want to get it out because how long has been operating how many deals have you done you mentioned foreign investor in the United States you're doing deals in the United States I know I've met one of your portfolio companies at an event iron iron on it iron net general Keith Alexander former head of the NSA you know get to just work with him without being vetted I guess so so how long a c5 capital been in business and where have you made your investments you mentioned cross jurisdiction across countries whatever it's called I don't know that so we've been and we've been in existence for about six years now our main focus is investing in Europe so we help European companies grow globally Europe historically has been underserved by venture capital we on an annual basis we invest about twenty seven billion dollars gets invested in venture capital in Europe as opposed to several multiples of that in the US so we have a very important part to play in Europe to how European enterprise software companies grow globally other important markets for us of course are Israel which is a major center of technology innovation and and the Middle East and then the u.s. the u.s. is still the world leader and venture capital both in terms of size but also in terms of the size of the market and of course the face and the excitement of the innovation here I want to get into me early career because again timing is key we're seeing this with you know whether it's a Supreme Court justice or anyone in their career their past comes back to haunt them it appears that has for you before we get there I want to ask you about you know when you look at the kind of scope of fraud and corruption that I've seen in just on the surface of government thing the government bit Beltway bandits in America is you got a nonprofit that feeds a for-profit and then what you know someone else runs a shell corporation so there's this intricate structures and that word was used which it kind of implies shell corporations a variety of backroom kind of smokey deals going on you mentioned transparency I do you have anything to hide John in in in our business we've got absolutely nothing to hide we have to be transparent we have to be open if you look at our social media profile you'll see we are communicating with the market almost on a daily basis every time we make an investment we press release that our website is very clear about who's involved enough who our partners are and the same applies to my own personal website and so in terms of the money movement around in terms of deploying investments we've seen Silicon Valley VCS move to China get their butts handed to them and then kind of adjust their scenes China money move around when you move money around you mentioned disclosure what do you mean there's filings to explain that piece it's just a little bit so every time we make an investment into a into a new portfolio company and we move the money to that market to make the investment we have to disclose who all the investors are who are involved in that investment so we have to disclose the ultimate beneficial ownership of all our limited partners to the law firms that are involved in the transactions and those law firms in turn have applications in terms of they own anti-money laundering laws in the local markets and this happens every time you move money around so I I think that the level of transparency in venture capital is just continue to rise exponentially and it's virtually impossible to conceal the identity of an investor this interesting this BBC article has a theme of national security risk kind of gloom and doom nuclear codes as mentioned it's like you want to scare someone you throw nuclear codes at it you want to get people's attention you play the Russian card I saw an article on the web that that said you know anything these days the me2 movement for governments just play the Russian card and you know instantly can discredit someone's kind of a desperation act so you got confident of interest in the government national security risk seems to be kind of a theme but before we get into the BBC news I noticed that there was a lot of conflated pieces kind of pulling together you know on one hand you know you're c5 you've done some things with your hat your past and then they just make basically associate that with running amazon's jedi project yes which i know is not to be true and you clarified that joan ends a problem joan so as a venture capital firm focused on investing in the space we have to work with all the Tier one cloud providers we are great believers in commercial cloud public cloud we believe that this is absolutely transformative not only for innovation but also for the way in which we do venture capital investment so we work with Amazon Web Services we work with Microsoft who work with Google and we believe that firstly that cloud has been made in America the first 15 companies in the world are all in cloud companies are all American and we believe that cloud like the internet and GPS are two great boons which the US economy the u.s. innovation economy have provided to the rest of the world cloud computing is reducing the cost of computing power with 50 percent every three years opening up innovation and opportunities for Entrepreneurship for health and well-being for the growth of economies on an unprecedented scale cloud computing is as important to the global economy today as the dollar ease as the world's reserve currency so we are great believers in cloud we great believers in American cloud computing companies as far as Amazon is concerned our relationship with Amazon Amazon is very Amazon Web Services is very clear and it's very defined we participate in a public Marcus program called AWS activate through which AWS supports hundreds of accelerators around the world with know-how with mentoring with teaching and with cloud credits to help entrepreneurs and startups grow their businesses and we have a very exciting focus for our two accelerators which is on in Washington we focus on peace technology we focus on taking entrepreneurs from conflict countries like Sudan Nigeria Pakistan to come to Washington to work on campus in the US government building the u.s. Institute for peace to scale these startups to learn all about cloud computing to learn how they can grow their businesses with cloud computing and to go back to their own countries to build peace and stability and prosperity their heaven so we're very proud of this mission in the Middle East and Bahrain our focus is on on female founders and female entrepreneurs we've got a program called nebula through which we empower female founders and female entrepreneurs interesting in the Middle East the statistics are the reverse from what we have in the West the majority of IT graduates in the Middle East are fimo and so there's a tremendous talent pool of of young dynamic female entrepreneurs coming out of not only the Gulf but the whole of the MENA region how about a relation with Amazon websites outside of their normal incubators they have incubators all over the place in the Amazon put out as Amazon Web Services put out a statement that said hey you know we have a lot of relationships with incubators this is normal course of business I know here in Silicon Valley at the startup loft this is this is their market filled market playbook so you fit into that is that correct as I'm I get that that's that's absolutely correct what we what is unusual about a table insists that this is a huge company that's focused on tiny startups a table started with startups it double uses first clients with startups and so here you have a huge business that has a deep understanding of startups and focus on startups and that's enormous the attractor for us and terrific for our accelerators department with them have you at c5 Capitol or individually have any formal or conversation with Amazon employees where you've had outside of giving feedback on products where you've tried to make change on their technology make change with their product management teams engineering you ever had at c5 capital whore have you personally been involved in influencing Amazon's product roadmap outside they're just giving normal feedback in the course of business that's way above my pay grade John firstly we don't have that kind of technical expertise in C 5 C 5 steam consists of a combination of entrepreneurs like myself people understand money really well and leaders we don't have that level of technical expertise and secondly that's what one our relationship with AWS is all about our relationship is entirely limited to the two startups and making sure that the two accelerators in making sure that the startups who pass through those accelerators succeed and make social impact and as a partner network component Amazon it's all put out there yes so in in a Barren accelerator we've we formed part of the Amazon partner network and the reason why we we did that was because we wanted to give some of the young people who come through the accelerator and know mastering cloud skills an opportunity to work on some real projects and real live projects so some of our young golf entrepreneurs female entrepreneurs have been working on building websites on Amazon Cloud and c5 capital has a relationship with former government officials you funded startups and cybersecurity that's kind of normal can you explain that positioning of it of how former government if it's whether it's US and abroad are involved in entrepreneurial activities and why that is may or may not be a problem certainly is a lot of kind of I would say smoke around this conversation around coffin of interest and you can you explain intelligence what that was it so I think the model for venture capital has been evolving and increasingly you get more and more differentiated models one of the key areas in which the venture capital model is changed is the fact that operating partners have become much more important to the success of venture capital firms so operating partners are people who bring real world experience to the investment experience of the investment team and in c-five we have the privilege of having a terrific group of operating partners people with both government and commercial backgrounds and they work very actively enough firm at all levels from our decision-making to the training and the mentoring of our team to helping us understand the way in which the world is exchanging to risk management to helping uh portfolio companies grow and Silicon Valley true with that to injuries in Horowitz two founders mr. friendly they bring in operating people that have entrepreneurial skills this is the new model understand order which has been a great source of inspiration to us for our model and and we built really believe this is a new model and it's really critical for the success of venture capitals to be going forward and the global impact is pretty significant one of things you mentioned I want to get your take on is as you operate a global transaction a lots happened a lot has to happen I mean we look at the ICO market on the cryptocurrency side its kind of you know plummeting obsoletes it's over now the mood security children's regulatory and transparency becomes critical you feel fully confident that you haven't you know from a regulatory standpoint c5 capital everything's out there absolutely risk management and regulated compliance and legal as the workstream have become absolutely critical for the success of venture capital firms and one of the reasons why this becomes so important John is because the venture capital world over the last few years have changed dramatically historically all the people involved in venture capital had very familiar names and came from very familiar places over the last few years with a diversification of global economic growth we've seen it's very significant amounts of money being invest invested in startups in China some people more money will invest in startups this year in China than in the US and we've seen countries like Saudi Arabia becoming a major source of venture capital funding some people say that as much as 70% of funding rounds this year in some way or another originated from the Gulf and we've seen places like Russia beginning to take an interest in technology innovation so the venture capital world is changing and for that reason compliance and regulation have become much more important but if Russians put 200 million dollars in face book and write out the check companies bright before that when the after 2008 we saw the rise of social networking I think global money certainly has something that I think a lot of people start getting used to and I want on trill down into that a little bit we talked about this BBC story that that hit and the the follow-on stories which actually didn't get picked up was mostly doing more regurgitation of the same story but one of the things that that they focus in on and the story was you and the trend now is your past is your enemy these days you know they try to drum up stuff in the past you've had a long career some of the stuff that they've been bringing in to paint you and the light that they did was from your past so I wanted to explore that with you I know you this is the first time you've talked about this and I appreciate you taking the time talk about your early career your background where you went to school because the way I'm reading this it sounds like you're a shady character I like like I interviewed on the queue but I didn't see that but you know I'm going to pressure here for that if you don't mind I'd like to to dig into that John thank you for that so I've had the I've had the privilege of a really amazingly interesting life and at the heart of at the heart of that great adventures been people and the privilege to work with really great people and good people I was born in South Africa I grew up in Africa went to school there qualified as a lawyer and then came to study in Britain when I studied international politics when I finished my studies international politics I got head hunted by a US consulting firm called crow which was a start of a 20 years career as an investigator first in crawl where I was a managing director in the London and then in building my own consulting firm which was called g3 and all of this led me to cybersecurity because as an investigator looking into organized crime looking into corruption looking into asset racing increasingly as the years went on everything became digital and I became very interested in finding evidence on electronic devices but starting my career and CRO was tremendous because Jules Kroll was a incredible mentor he could walk through an office and call everybody by their first name any Kroll office anywhere in the world and he always took a kindly interest in the people who work for him so it was a great school to go to and and I worked on some terrific cases including some very interesting Russian cases and Russian organized crime cases just this bag of Kroll was I've had a core competency in doing investigative work and also due diligence was that kind of focus yes although Kroll was the first company in the world to really have a strong digital practice led by Alan Brugler of New York Alan established the first computer forensics practice which was all focused about finding evidence on devices and everything I know about cyber security today started with me going to school with Alan Brolin crawl and they also focused on corruption uncovering this is from Wikipedia Kroll clients help Kroll helps clients improve operations by uncovering kickbacks fraud another form of corruptions other specialty areas is forensic accounting background screening drug testing electronic investigation data recovery SATA result Omar's McLennan in 2004 for 1.9 billion mark divested Kroll to another company I'll take credit risk management to diligence investigator in Falls Church Virginia over 150 countries call Kroll was the first CRO was the first household brand name in this field of of investigations and today's still is probably one of the strongest brand names and so it was a great firm to work in and was a great privilege to be part of it yeah high-end high-profile deals were there how many employees were in Kroll cuz I'd imagine that the alumni that that came out of Kroll probably have found places in other jobs similar to yes do an investigative work like you know they out them all over the world many many alumni from Kroll and many of them doing really well and doing great work ok great so now the next question want to ask you is when you in Kroll the South Africa connection came up so I got to ask you it says business side that you're a former South African spy are you a former South African spy no John I've never worked for any government agency and in developing my career my my whole focus has been on investigations out of the Kroll London office I did have the opportunity to work in South Africa out of the Kroll London office and this was really a seminal moment in my career when I went to South Africa on a case for a major international credit-card company immediately after the end of apartheid when democracy started to look into the scale and extent of credit card fraud at the request of this guy what year was there - how old were you this was in 1995 1996 I was 25 26 years old and one of the things which this credit card company asked me to do was to assess what was the capability of the new democratic government in South Africa under Nelson Mandela to deal with crime and so I had the privilege of meeting mr. Mandela as the president to discuss this issue with him and it was an extraordinary man the country's history because there was such an openness and a willingness to to address issues of this nature and to grapple with them so he was released from prison at that time I remember those days and he became president that's why he called you and you met with him face to face of a business conversation around working on what the future democracy is and trying to look at from a corruption standpoint or just kind of in general was that what was that conversation can you share so so that so the meeting involved President Mandela and and the relevant cabinet ministers the relevant secretaries and his cabinet - responsible for for these issues and the focus of our conversation really started with well how do you deal with credit card fraud and how do you deal with large-scale fraud that could be driven by organized crime and at the time this was an issue of great concern to the president because there was bombing in Kate of a Planet Hollywood cafe where a number of people got very severely injured and the president believed that this could have been the result of a protection racket in Cape Town and so he wanted to do something about it he was incredibly proactive and forward-leaning and in an extraordinary way he ended the conversation by by asking where the Kroll can help him and so he commissioned Kroll to build the capacity of all the black officers that came out of the ANC and have gone into key government positions on how to manage organized crime investigations it was the challenge at that time honestly I can imagine apartheid I remember you know I was just at a college that's not properly around the same age as you it was a dynamic time to say the least was his issue around lack of training old school techniques because you know that was right down post-cold-war and then did what were the concerns not enough people was it just out of control was it a corrupt I mean just I mean what was the core issue that Nelson wanted to hire Kroll and you could work his core issue was he wanted to ensure the stability of South Africa's democracy that was his core focus and he wanted to make South Africa an attractive place where international companies felt comfortable and confident in investing and that was his focus and he felt that at that time because so many of the key people in the ANC only had training in a cold war context that there wasn't a Nessy skill set to do complex financial or more modern investigations and it was very much focused he was always the innovator he was very much focused on bringing the best practices and the best investigative techniques to the country he was I felt in such a hurry that he doesn't want to do this by going to other governments and asking for the help he wanted to Commission it himself and so he gave he gave a crawl with me as the project leader a contract to do this and my namesake Francois Pienaar has become very well known because of the film Invictus and he's been he had the benefit of Mandela as a mentor and as a supporter and that changed his career the same thing happened to me so what did he actually asked you to do was it to train build a force because there's this talk that and was a despite corruption specifically it was it more both corruption and or stability because they kind of go hand in hand policy and it's a very close link between corruption and instability and and president Ellis instructions were very clear to Crowley said go out and find me the best people in the world the most experienced people in the world who can come to South Africa and train my people how to fight organized crime so I went out and I found some of the best people from the CIA from mi6 the British intelligence service from the Drug Enforcement Agency here in the US form officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's detectives from Scotland Yard prosecutors from the US Justice Department and all of them for a number of years traveled to South Africa to train black officers who were newly appointed in key roles in how to combat organized crime and this was you acting as an employee he had crow there's not some operative this is he this was me very much acting as a as an executive and crow I was the project leader Kroll was very well structured and organized and I reported to the chief executive officer in the London office nor Garret who was the former head of the CIA's Near East Division and Nelson Mandela was intimately involved in this with you at Krall President Mandela was the ultimate support of this project and he then designated several ministers to work on it and also senior officials in the stories that had been put out this past week they talked about this to try to make it sound like you're involved on two sides of the equation they bring up scorpions was this the scorpions project that they referred to so it was the scorpions scorpion sounds so dangerous and a movie well there's a movie a movie does feature this so at the end of the training project President Mandela and deputy president Thabo Mbeki who subsequently succeeded him as president put together a ministerial committee to look at what should they do with the capacity that's been built with this investment that they made because for a period of about three years we had all the leading people the most experienced people that have come out of some of the best law enforcement agencies and some of the best intelligence services come and trained in South Africa and this was quite this was quite something John because many of the senior officers in the ANC came from a background where they were trained by the opponents of the people came to treat trained them so so many of them were trained by the Stasi in East Germany some of them were trained by the Russian KGB some of them were trained by the Cubans so we not only had to train them we also had to win their trust and when we started this that's a diverse set of potential dogma and or just habits a theory modernised if you will right is that what the there was there was a question of of learning new skills and there was a question about also about learning management capabilities there was also question of learning the importance of the media for when you do difficult and complex investigations there was a question about using digital resources but there was also fundamentally a question of just building trust and when we started this program none of the black officers wanted to be photographed with all these foreign trainers who were senior foreign intelligence officers when we finished that everyone wanted to be in the photograph and so this was a great South African success story but the President and the deputy president then reflected on what to do with his capacity and they appointed the ministerial task force to do this and we were asked to make recommendations to this Minister ministerial task force and one of the things which we did was we showed them a movie because you referenced the movie and the movie we showed them was the untouchables with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery which is still one of my favorite and and greatest movies and the story The Untouchables is about police corruption in Chicago and how in the Treasury Department a man called Eliot Ness put together a group of officers from which he selected from different places with clean hands to go after corruption during the Probie and this really captured the president's imagination and so he said that's what he want and Ella yeah okay so he said della one of the untouchables he wanted Eliot Ness exactly Al Capone's out there and and how many people were in that goodness so we asked that we we established the government then established decided to establish and this was passed as a law through Parliament the director of special operations the DSO which colloquy became known as the scorpions and it had a scorpion as a symbol for this unit and this became a standalone anti-corruption unit and the brilliant thing about it John was that the first intake of scorpion officers were all young black graduates many of them law graduates and at the time Janet Reno was the US Attorney General played a very crucial role she allowed half of the first intake of young cratchits to go to Quantico and to do the full FBI course in Quantico and this was the first group of foreign students who've ever been admitted to Quantico to do the full Quantico were you involved at what score's at that time yes sir and so you worked with President Mandela yes the set of the scorpions is untouchable skiing for the first time as a new democracy is emerging the landscape is certainly changing there's a transformation happening we all know the history laugh you don't watch Invictus probably great movie to do that you then worked with the Attorney General United States to cross-pollinate the folks in South Africa black officers law degrees Samar's fresh yes this unit with Quantico yes in the United States I had the privilege of attending the the graduation ceremony of the first of South African officers that completed the Quantico course and representing crow they on the day you had us relationships at that time to crawl across pollen I had the privilege of working with some of the best law enforcement officers and best intelligence officers that has come out of the u.s. services and they've been tremendous mentors in my career they've really shaped my thinking they've shaped my values and they've they've shaved my character so you're still under 30 at this time so give us a is that where this where are we in time now just about a 30 so you know around the nine late nineties still 90s yeah so client-server technologies there okay so also the story references Leonard McCarthy and these spy tapes what is this spy tape saga about it says you had a conversation with McCarthy me I'm thinking that a phone tap explain that spy tape saga what does it mean who's Lennon McCarthy explain yourself so so so Leonard McCarthy it's a US citizen today he served two terms as the vice president for institutional integrity at the World Bank which is the world's most important anti-corruption official he started his career as a prosecutor in South Africa many years ago and then became the head of the economic crimes division in the South African Justice Department and eventually became the head of the scorpions and many years after I've left Kroll and were no longer involved in in the work of the scorpions he texted me one evening expressing a concern and an anxiety that I had about the safety of his family and I replied to him with two text messages one was a Bible verse and the other one was a Latin saying and my advice name was follow the rule of law and put the safety of your family first and that was the advice I gave him so this is how I imagined the year I think of it the internet was just there this was him this was roundabout 2000 December 2007 okay so there was I phone just hit so text messaging Nokia phones all those big yeah probably more text message there so you sitting anywhere in London you get a text message from your friend yep later this past late tonight asking for help and advice and I gave him the best advice I can he unfortunately was being wiretapped and those wiretaps were subsequently published and became the subject of much controversy they've now been scrutinized by South Africa's highest court and the court has decided that those wiretaps are of no impact and of importance in the scheme of judicial decision-making and our unknown provenance and on and on unknown reliability they threw it out basically yeah they're basically that's the president he had some scandals priors and corruption but back to the tapes you the only involvement on the spy tapes was friend sending you a text message that says hey I'm running a corruption you know I'm afraid for my life my family what do I do and you give some advice general advice and that's it as there was there any more interactions with us no that's it that's it okay so you weren't like yeah working with it hey here's what we get strategy there was nothing that going on no other interactions just a friendly advice and that's what they put you I gave him my I gave him my best advice when you when you work in when you work as an investigator very much as and it's very similar in venture capital it's all about relationships and you want to preserve relationships for the long term and you develop deep royalties to its people particularly people with whom you've been through difficult situations as I have been with Leonard much earlier on when I was still involved in Kroll and giving advice to South African government on issues related to the scorpius so that that has a lot of holes and I did think that was kind of weird they actually can produce the actual tax I couldn't find that the spy tapes so there's a spy tape scandal out there your name is on out on one little transaction globbed on to you I mean how do you feel about that I mean you must've been pretty pissed when you saw that when you do it when when you do when you do investigative work you see really see everything and all kinds of things and the bigger the issues that you deal with the more frequently you see things that other people might find unusual I are you doing any work right now with c5 at South Africa and none whatsoever so I've I retired from my investigative Korea in 2014 I did terrific 20 years as an investigator during my time as investigator I came to understood the importance of digital and cyber and so at the end of it I saw an opportunity to serve a sector that historically have been underserved with capital which is cyber security and of course there are two areas very closely related to cyber security artificial intelligence and cloud and that's why I created c5 after I sold my investigator firm with five other families who equally believed in the importance of investing private capital to make a difference invest in private capital to help bring about innovation that can bring stability to the digital world and that's the mission of c-5 before I get to the heart news I want to drill in on the BBC stories I think that's really the focal point of you know why we're talking just you know from my standpoint I remember living as a young person in that time breaking into the business you know my 20s and 30s you had Live Aid in 1985 and you had 1995 the internet happened there was so much going on between those that decade 85 to 95 you were there I was an American so I didn't really have a lot exposure I did some work for IBM and Europe in 1980 says it's co-op student but you know I had some peak in the international world it must been pretty dynamic the cross-pollination the melting pot of countries you know the Berlin Wall goes down you had the cold war's ending you had apartheid a lot of things were going on around you yes so in that dynamic because if if the standard is you had links to someone you know talked about why how important it was that this melting pot and how it affected your relationships and how it looks now looking back because now you can almost tie anything to anything yes so I think the 90s was one of the most exciting periods of time because you had the birth of the internet and I started working on Internet related issues yet 20 million users today we have three and a half billion users and ten billion devices unthinkable at the time but in the wake of the internet also came a lot of changes as you say the Berlin Wall came down democracy in South Africa the Oslo peace process in the time that I worked in Kroll some of them made most important and damaging civil wars in Africa came to an end including the great war in the Congo peace came to Sudan and Angola the Ivory Coast so a lot of things happening and if you have a if you had a an international career at that time when globalization was accelerating you got to no a lot of people in different markets and both in crow and in my consulting business a key part of what it but we did was to keep us and Western corporations that were investing in emerging markets safe your credibility has been called in questions with this article and when I get to in a second what I want to ask you straight up is it possible to survive in the international theatre to the level that you're surviving if what they say is true if you if you're out scamming people or you're a bad actor pretty much over the the time as things get more transparent it's hard to survive right I mean talk about that dynamic because I just find it hard to believe that to be successful the way you are it's not a johnny-come-lately firms been multiple years operating vetted by the US government are people getting away in the shadows is it is is it hard because I almost imagine those are a lot of arbitrage I imagine ton of arbitrage that you that are happening there how hard or how easy it is to survive to be that shady and corrupt in this new era because with with with investigated with with intelligence communities with some terrific if you follow the money now Bitcoin that's a whole nother story but that's more today but to survive the eighties and nineties and to be where you are and what they're alleging I just what's your thoughts well to be able to attract capital and investors you have to have very high standards of governance and compliance because ultimately that's what investors are looking for and what investors will diligence when they make an investment with you so to carry the confidence of investors good standards of governance and compliance are of critical importance and raising venture capital and Europe is tough it's not like the US babe there's an abundance of venture capital available it's very hard Europe is under served by capital the venture capital invested in the US market is multiple of what we invest in Europe so you need to be even more focused on governance and compliance in Europe than you would be perhaps on other markets I think the second important point with Gmail John is that technology is brought about a lot of transparency and this is a major area of focus for our piece tech accelerator where we have startups who help to bring transparency to markets which previously did not have transparency for example one of the startups that came through our accelerator has brought complete transparency to the supply chain for subsistence farmers in Africa all the way to to the to the shelf of Walmart or a big grocery retailer in in the US or Europe and so I think technology is bringing a lot more more transparency we also have a global anti-corruption Innovation Challenge called shield in the cloud where we try and find and recognize the most innovative corporations governments and countries in the space so let's talk about the BBC story that hit 12 it says is a US military cloud the DoD Jedi contractor that's coming to award the eleventh hour safe from Russia fears over sensitive data so if this essentially the headline that's bolded says a technology company bidding for a Pentagon contract that's Amazon Web Services to store sensitive data has close partnerships with a firm linked to a sanctioned Russian oligarch the BBC has learned goes on to essentially put fear and tries to hang a story that says the national security of America is at risk because of c5u that's what we're talking about right now so so what's your take on this story I mean did you wake up and get an email said hey check out the BBC you're featured in and they're alleging that you have links to Russia and Amazon what Jon first I have to go I first have to do a disclosure I've worked for the BBC as an investigator when I was in Kroll and in fact I let the litigation support for the BBC in the biggest libel claim in British history which was post 9/11 when the BBC did a broadcast mistakenly accusing a mining company in Africa of laundering money for al-qaeda and so I represented the BBC in this case I was the manager hired you they hired me to delete this case for them and I'm I helped the BBC to reduce a libel claim of 25 million dollars to $750,000 so I'm very familiar with the BBC its integrity its standards and how it does things and I've always held the BBC in the highest regard and believed that the BBC makes a very important contribution to make people better informed about the world so when I heard about the story I was very disappointed because it seemed to me that the BBC have compromised the independence and the independence of the editorial control in broadcasting the story the reason why I say that is because the principal commentator in this story as a gentleman called John Wheeler who's familiar to me as a someone who's been trolling our firm on internet for the last year making all sorts of allegations the BBC did not disclose that mr. Weiler is a former Oracle executive the company that's protesting the Jedi bidding contract and secondly that he runs a lobbying firm with paid clients and that he himself often bid for government contracts in the US government context you're saying that John Wheeler who's sourced in the story has a quote expert and I did check him out I did look at what he was doing I checked out his Twitter he seems to be trying to socialise a story heavily first he needed eyes on LinkedIn he seems to be a consultant firm like a Beltway yes he runs a he runs a phone called in interoperability Clearing House and a related firm called the IT acquisition Advisory Council and these two organizations work very closely together the interoperability Clearing House or IC H is a consulting business where mr. Weiler acts for paying clients including competitors for this bidding contract and none of this was disclosed by the BBC in their program the second part of this program that I found very disappointing was the fact that the BBC in focusing on the Russian technology parks cocuwa did not disclose the list of skok of our partners that are a matter of public record on the Internet if you look at this list very closely you'll see c5 is not on there neither Amazon Web Services but the list of companies that are on there are very familiar names many of them competitors in this bidding process who acted as founding partners of skok about Oracle for example as recently as the 28th of November hosted what was described as the largest cloud computing conference in Russia's history at Skolkovo this is the this is the place which the BBC described as this notorious den of spies and at this event which Oracle hosted they had the Russian presidential administration on a big screen as one of their clients in Russia so some Oracle is doing business in Russia they have like legit real links to Russia well things you're saying if they suddenly have very close links with Skolkovo and so having a great many other Khayyam is there IBM Accenture cisco say Microsoft is saying Oracle is there so Skolkovo has a has a very distinguished roster of partners and if the BBC was fair and even-handed they would have disclosed us and they would have disclosed the fact that neither c5 nor Amazon feature as Corcovado you feel that the BBC has been duped the BBC clearly has been duped the program that they broadcasted is really a parlor game of six degrees of separation which they try to spun into a national security crisis all right so let's tell us John while ago you're saying John Wyler who's quoted in the story as an expert and by the way I read in the story my favorite line that I wanted to ask you on was there seems to be questions being raised but the question is being raised or referring to him so are you saying that he is not an expert but a plant for the story what's what's his role he's saying he works for Oracle or you think do you think he's being paid by Oracle like I can't comment on mr. Wireless motivation what strikes me is the fact that is a former Oracle executive what's striking is that he clearly on his website for the IC H identifies several competitors for the Jedi business clients and that all of this should have been disclosed by the BBC rather than to try and characterize and portray him as an independent expert on this story well AWS put out a press release or a blog post essentially hum this you know you guys had won it we're very clear and this I know it goes to the top because that's how Amazon works nothing goes out until it goes to the top which is Andy chassis and the senior people over there it says here's the relationship with c5 and ATS what school you use are the same page there but also they hinted the old guard manipulation distant I don't think they use the word disinformation campaign they kind of insinuate it and that's what I'm looking into I want to ask you are you part are you a victim of a disinformation campaign do you believe that you're not a victim being targeted with c5 as part of a disinformation campaign put on by a competitor to AWS I think what we've seen over the course of this last here is an enormous amount of disinformation around this contract and around this bidding process and they've a lot of the information that has been disseminated has not only not been factual but in some cases have been patently malicious well I have been covering Amazon for many many years this guy Tom Wyler is in seems to be circulating multiple reports invested in preparing for this interview I checked Vanity Fair he's quoted in Vanity Fair he's quoted in the BBC story and there's no real or original reporting other than those two there's some business side our article which is just regurgitating the Business Insider I mean the BBC story and a few other kind of blog stories but no real original yes no content don't so in every story that that's been written on this subject and as you say most serious publication have thrown this thrown these allegations out but in the in those few instances where they've managed to to publish these allegations and to leverage other people's credibility to their advantage and leverage other people's credibility for their competitive advantage John Wheeler has been the most important and prominent source of the allegations someone who clearly has vested commercial interests someone who clearly works for competitors as disclosed on his own website and none of this has ever been surfaced or addressed I have multiple sources have confirmed to me that there's a dossier that has been created and paid for by a firm or collection of firms to discredit AWS I've seen some of the summary documents of that and that is being peddled around to journalists we have not been approached yet I'm not sure they will because we actually know the cloud what cloud computing is so I'm sure we could debunk it by just looking at it and what they were putting fors was interesting is this an eleventh-hour a desperation attempt because I have the Geo a report here that was issued under Oracle's change it says there are six conditions why we're looking at one sole cloud although it's not a it's a multiple bid it's not an exclusive to amazon but so there's reasons why and they list six service levels highly specialized check more favorable terms and conditions with a single award expected cause of administration of multiple contracts outweighs the benefits of multiple awards the projected orders are so intricately related that only a single contractor can reasonably be perform the work meaning that Amazon has the only cloud that can do that work now I've reported on the cube and it's looking angle that it's true there's things that other clouds just don't have anyone has private they have the secret the secret clouds the total estimated value of the contract is less than the simplified acquisition threshold or multiple awards would not be in the best interest this is from them this is a government report so it seems like there's a conspiracy against Amazon where you are upon and in in this game collect you feel that collateral damage song do you do you believe that to be true collateral damage okay well okay so now the the John Wheeler guys so investigate you've been an investigator so you mean you're not you know you're not a retired into this a retired investigator you're retired investigated worked on things with Nelson Mandela Kroll Janet Reno Attorney General you've vetted by the United States government you have credibility you have relationships with people who have have top-secret clearance all kinds of stuff but I mean do you have where people have top-secret clearance or or former people who had done well we have we have the privilege of of working with a very distinguished group of senior national security leaders as operating partisan c5 and many of them have retained their clearances and have been only been able to do so because c5 had to pass through a very deep vetting process so for you to be smeared like this you've been in an investigative has you work at a lot of people this is pretty obvious to you this is like a oh is it like a deep state conspiracy you feel it's one vendor - what is your take and what does collateral damage mean to you well I recently spoke at the mahkum conference on a session on digital warfare and one of the key points I made there was that there are two things that are absolutely critical for business leaders and technology leaders at this point in time one we have to clearly say that our countries are worth defending we can't walk away from our countries because the innovation that we are able to build and scale we're only able to do because we live in democracies and then free societies that are governed by the rule of law the second thing that I think is absolutely crucial for business leaders in the technology community is to accept that there must be a point where national interest overrides competition it must be a point where we say the benefit and the growth and the success of our country is more important to us than making commercial profits and therefore there's a reason for us either to cooperate or to cease competition or to compete in a different way what might takes a little bit more simple than that's a good explanation is I find these smear campaigns and fake news and I was just talking with Kara Swisher on Twitter just pinging back and forth you know either journalists are chasing Twitter and not really doing the original courting or they're being fed stories if this is truly a smear campaign as being fed by a paid dossier then that hurts people when families and that puts corporate interests over the right thing so I think I a personal issue with that that's fake news that's just disinformation but it's also putting corporate inches over over families and people so I just find that to be kind of really weird when you say collateral damage earlier what did you mean by that just part of the campaign you personally what's what's your view okay I think competition which is not focused on on performance and on innovation and on price points that's competition that's hugely destructive its destructive to the fabric of innovation its destructive of course to the reputation of the people who fall in the line of sight of this kind of competition but it's also hugely destructive to national interest Andrae one of the key stories here with the BBC which has holes in it is that the Amazon link which we just talked about but there's one that they bring up that seems to be core in all this and just the connections to Russia can you talk about your career over the career from whether you when you were younger to now your relationship with Russia why is this Russian angle seems to be why they bring into the Russia angle into it they seem to say that c-5 Cable has connections they call deep links personal links into Russia so to see what that so c5 is a venture capital firm have no links to Russia c5 has had one individual who is originally of Russian origin but it's been a longtime Swiss resident and you national as a co investor into a enterprise software company we invested in in 2015 in Europe we've since sold that company but this individual Vladimir Kuznetsov who's became the focus of the BBC's story was a co investor with us and the way in which we structure our investment structures is that everything is transparent so the investment vehicle for this investment was a London registered company which was on the records of Companies House not an offshore entity and when Vladimir came into this company as a co investor for compliance and regulatory purposes we asked him to make his investment through this vehicle which we controlled and which was subject to our compliance standards and completely transparent and in this way he made this investment now when we take on both investors and Co investors we do that subject to very extensive due diligence and we have a very robust and rigorous due diligence regime which in which our operating partners who are leaders of great experience play an important role in which we use outside due diligence firms to augment our own judgment and to make sure we have all the facts and finally we also compare notes with other financial institutions and peers and having done that with Vladimir Kuznetsov when he made this one investment with us we reached the conclusion that he was acting in his own right as an independent angel investor that his left renova many years ago as a career executive and that he was completely acceptable as an investor so that you think that the BBC is making an inaccurate Association the way they describe your relationship with Russia absolutely the the whole this whole issue of the provenance of capital has become of growing importance to the venture capital industry as you and I discussed earlier with many more different sources of capital coming out of places like China like Russia Saudi Arabia other parts of the world and therefore going back again to you the earlier point we discussed compliance and due diligence our critical success factors and we have every confidence in due diligence conclusions that we reached about vladimir quits net source co-investment with us in 2015 so I did some digging on c5 razor bidco this was the the portion of the company in reference to the article I need to get your your take on this and they want to get you on the record on this because it's you mentioned I've been a law above board with all the compliance no offshore entities this is a personal investment that he made Co investment into an entity you guys set up for the transparency and compliance is that true that's correct no side didn't see didn't discover this would my my children could have found this this this company was in a transparent way on the records in Companies House and and Vladimir's role and investment in it was completely on the on the public record all of this was subject to financial conduct authority regulation and anti money laundering and no your client standards and compliance so there was no great big discovery this was all transparent all out in the open and we felt very confident in our due diligence findings and so you feel very confident Oh issue there at all special purpose none whatsoever is it this is classic this is international finance yes sir so in the venture capital industry creating a special purpose vehicle for a particular investment is a standard practice in c-five we focus on structuring those special-purpose vehicles in the most transparent way possible and that was his money from probably from Russia and you co invested into this for this purpose of doing these kinds of deals with Russia well we just right this is kind of the purpose of that no no no this so in 2015 we invested into a European enterprise software company that's a strategic partner of Microsoft in Scandinavian country and we invested in amount of 16 million pounds about at the time just more than 20 million dollars and subsequent in August of that year that Amir Kuznetsov having retired for nova and some time ago in his own right as an angel investor came in as a minority invest alongside us into this investment but we wanted to be sure that his investment was on our control and subject to our compliance standards so we requested him to make his investment through our special purpose vehicle c5 raised a bit co this investment has since been realized it's been a great success and this business is going on to do great things and serve great clients it c5 taking russian money no see if I was not taking Russian money since since the onset of sanctions onboarding Russian money is just impossible sanctions have introduced complexity and have introduced regulatory risk related to Russian capital and so we've taken a decision that we will not and we can't onboard Russian capital and sanctions have also impacted my investigative career sanctions have also completely changed because what the US have done very effectively is to make sanctions a truly global regime and in which ever country are based it doesn't really matter you have to comply with US sanctions this is not optional for anybody on any sanctions regime including the most recent sanctions on Iran so if there are sanctions in place you can't touch it have you ever managed Russian oligarchs money or interests at any time I've never managed a Russian oligarchs money at any point in time I served for a period of a year honest on the board of a South African mining company in which Renova is a minority invest alongside an Australian company called South 32 and the reason why I did this was because of my support for African entrepreneurship this was one of the first black owned mining companies in South Africa that was established with a British investment in 2004 this business have just grown to be a tremendous success and so for a period of a year I offered to help them on the board and to support them as they as they looked at how they can grow and scale the business I have a couple more questions Gabe so I don't know if you wanna take a break you want to keep let's take a break okay let's take a quick break do a quick break I think that's great that's the meat of it great job by the way fantastic lady here thanks for answering those questions the next section I want to do is compliment

(upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios. The conference season is just about ready to take off so we still have some time to get some Cube conversations in before we hit the road and spend the next several days and weeks and months in Las Vegas, Orlando, and points on the compass. So, we're excited to have our next guest. She's Lynn Lucas, Cube alumni, CMO of Cohesity, Lynn, great to see you again. >> Jeff, super to be here for the first time in Palo Alto. >> Yeah, how do you like the studio? >> I love it! >> It's a little different than the vibe at the conferences. >> A little quieter-- >> A little quieter. >> Than the conferences but I like it. >> Well good, good, welcome, so you have relatively recently joined a new company, Cohesity, so congratulations on that. >> Thanks, yeah. >> And just curious, one, give us just a quick overview on Cohesity but more importantly, what did you see that attracted you, to get you to join? >> Great, yeah, so Cohesity, just joined at the beginning of January, having a blast. And really what I saw that attracted me to Cohesity was three things. It's an incredible founder, Mohit Aron, who was formerly the CTO and co-founder of Nutanix called the Father of Hyperconvergence and before that the lead developer at Google File System. And, he really is doing what a lot of Silicon Valley is known for, which is he took a step back and is looking at this space in the data center that we call secondary data, back up, archives, replications, test dev, analytics, and said, "You know what? "The world doesn't need a better point solution. "We need to take a step back and look "at how this gold mine of data can be used "in a much more efficient way." Because data is after all, is what's powering the worlds businesses and their differentiation. So, the technology, Mohit himself is a founder and then it's just an incredible start up culture. It's fast growing, we're having fun every day, I love going to work. >> It's amazing, I was just doing some background and you guys have raised $160 million. The list of leadership and board and advisory is pretty amazing. It's like a who's who from this industry. So he pulled together a helluva team. >> He really has and you know Carl Eschenbach, former COO of VM Ware is on our board. >> Cube alumni, Patrick Rogers. >> Rob Salmon. >> Cube alumni, we could go on and on. >> Yes, Ned App, Dan Wormehoven, Google Ventures is invested, Sequoia. I think Sequoia said we're the fastest growing company in their portfolio. We grew 600% year over year last year, 40 to 50% growth in new customers every quarter, cause they're is just such a pent up demand to really solve some of the problems that haven't been addressed over the last, really, couple of decades for the inefficiencies and how all of this data for these secondary workloads is managed. >> So you got an interesting graphic on the website talking about secondary data. And that it's really the ugly part of the iceberg below the water and significantly bigger, heavier, and more expensive to manage than the primary data. So I wonder if you could take us into that a little bit deeper, how did it get to be such a problem? And why is this new approach a better way to attack that problem? >> Sure and an iceberg is really kind of a good metaphor when you think about the data center. You know, we've got our production, and applications, primary storage and that's what's floating above the water and we see that 20% but below is another 80%. And, according to most industry analysts, IDC, Gartner, that represents not just 80% of the data but 80% of the cost. On average, IDC says every organization has 12 to 14 copies of each piece of data. And that happens because what's grown up over time is point solutions for all the various work loads. You got one set of hardware and software for backup. You've got another set for test dev. You've got another set for analytics. There's been no sharing of the data. There's no single infrastructure, knowing even or operations knowing what you have and being able to tell you where the inefficiencies are and so you think about a developer in retail or in a bank organization, they're requesting a copy of a data to develop the new applications that copy gets instantiated. They do their work, never gets erased, just like in our consumer life. >> Right, Right. >> Do you ever erase photos off your phone? >> I can't tell you how many copies and copies and copies of, cause it's, cause it's often-- >> It's easy. >> You figure, it's easier to make another copy just in case, right? >> Exactly, so that never goes away and then you've got yet another copy for the next time they need an updated set. And so, this has been multiplying and it creates just an incredible expense to maintain and operate. And it also creates a lot of risk these days for organizations because of new regulations like GDPR. >> Right. >> Where are all those copies of personal information from e-use citizens, people don't even know anymore. >> Right, and then there's, you know, two other big factors that have come into play in recent years. Software to find and public cloud. Two really big, huge tidal waves of change that were not accommodated in prior architectures so you guys, obviously, saw that opportunity glommed on and are now offering something that can take care of the different types of needs based on what type of infrastructure you need, really not at a company level. But really at the application or the workload level right? >> Yeah, so I think it's a great point and I won't claim any credit for this, this is Mehit and his team of developers and really, as you pointed out, what do we see organizations looking for now? They now realize that, hey, if I can get a software to find platform, a lot of commodity hardware does a really good job for me and I want to have that flexibility to choose, you know, what vendor I might be using. So, Mohit developed a software to find platform that addresses, how do you bring all of these data and these workloads together in one platform so I can have a consistent set of infrastructure and a consistent operational model and, because of his heritage, working at Google, being one of the lead developers for Google File System, it comes with this cloud first mentality. So this is not a bolt on with a gateway to get to Amazon or get to Azure. >> Right. >> This is a software platform that natively understands and spans both your private cloud and your on premises data center and the public cloud. So it gives an IT organization the flexibility to choose how do I want to use the public cloud with my private data center and not have to think really about, kind of, that plumbing below. >> Right. >> Below the water line anymore. >> Because, because there is no either or, right? It's really workload specific where that particular workload lives and the storage that supports that. >> Yeah, so so let me be specific about what Cohesity offers. It's software defined and we offer a appliance so that it's very easy for an organization to go in and say, you know what, data protection, backup frankly, legacy architectures built 20 years ago, before the advent of the cloud. Biggest pain point we see right now can move in a Cohesity hyperconverged appliance and solve that problem and gain massive business benefits right away. We offer global deduplication, very advanced compression and erasure coding and we have customers that are telling us that they're seeing eight to one, ten to one, even 14 to one ratios that really then give them-- >> 14:1 ratio and a reduction of capacity to store the same amount of stuff? >> Versus from some of the current customer, or current vendors that they have been using, from what I would call these legacy architectures. >> Right, right, that's pretty significant. >> So they're getting an amazing storage efficiency. Then, they often next say, wow I'd like to give my developers the flexibility of spinning this up in the cloud. So we offer a cloud edition that allows them to choose whether they want to operate on Azure on Amazon on Google cloud and be able to move that data into the cloud, use it for a test dev instance, but again all under the same software interface all looks like one operating system. No bolt on gateway to manage. >> Right, so you get it-- >> And then. >> I'm sorry go ahead. >> And I was going to say in the third part is many organizations obviously have remote offices, branch offices so there's a virtual edition too. >> Right. So I'm just curious on the cloud side. So Andy Chassis' been on a ton of times, great guy. >> Yes. >> You know, one of the promises of cloud is spin up what you need and spin down when you - don't, as you said. >> Right. >> Nobody ever spins anything down so are you seeing customers have the same type of, of economic impact in managing their storage that's in the public clouds? Because now they're actually spinning down what they don't need or consolidating more efficiently. >> Yeah, so I think that we've seen, in general, in the industry that if you likened the data center it'd kind of been a messy garage where there was a lot of things in the garage and you weren't really sure what it was. A lot of folks, I would say five plus years ago, were like, kind of ran to the cloud cause it was clean and new and it was like that new shiny storage box. >> Right. >> You know, that you see parked on people's driveways sometimes and then realize that there can be a lot of expense, cause you're really replicating in the cloud, some of these same silos if you're not careful. >> Right. >> We're going to help customers avoid that. I think customers are much more sophisticated now than say five years ago. And they're now looking at what's the best way for me to incorporate public cloud. >> Right. >> So really common use case right now would be what I mentioned before test dev, let's move something there, get the benefit of the compute, do some analytics on it, build some new application, maybe get spun down after that but another really common use case is a lot of organizations worried about disaster recovery, bringing the cloud in as their second site. Because that's a very efficient way for them to do that and not build yet another on premises data center. >> Silo. >> Yeah. >> So, the company's been around, the a round is 2013, you're coming in as a CMO. You're brand new and fresh, what's your charter? You know, you didn't come in at a low level you came in with the C, what are you excited about, what you know, again why did they bring you in and what are you going to bring to the table and what are your priorities for the rest of 2018 and beyond? I still can't believe we're a third, a quarter of the way through 2018. >> Yes we are. We're going to be at those shows pretty soon. >> (laughing) I know, they're comin'. >> They are, so I'm here really to build on the good work that the team has done and I'm just really thrilled to be at the company. I think what my charter is is to continue the company's expansion. So, they've seen tremendous growth and in fact, we've just really launched into Asia so we now have a large sales presence in Australia, New Zealand and we're going to continue to expand into the rest of Asia. Significantly expanded in Europe as well recently. So part of my charter is to bring the marketing programs to all of these new regions and in general, to up our awareness level. I think Cohesity has an incredible opportunity to really be one of those companies that changes the data center landscape. >> Right. >> And I want to make sure the world knows about the incredible benefits the customers are seeing already with us. And do that in a way that really features the customer voice. I've been on theCUBE before and I talked about that. For me, that is all about ensuring that the customer voice is really front and center and so hopefully we'll bring a Cohesity customer here. >> Good, well and I just want to ask you kind of from a marketing professional in B2B business, it's a really challenging time in terms of, of the scarcity now is not information, which it used to be. Now the scarcity is in attention and people can get a lot of information before they ever make it to your website within peer groups and hopefully watching some Cube interviews, et cetera. So I'm just curious to get your perspective from a Chief Marketing Officer how are you kind of looking at the challenges of getting the message out. It's a really different world than it was years and years ago. >> Yeah. >> People aren't reading white paper so much and it's a different challenge. >> Yeah, and it's part of the fun actually in being in marketing and being in marketing and tech because a lot of that cool technology for marketing is invented right here in the Valley too. So, you know, I think that word of mouth still actually plays an incredible role and it is that customer voice but bringing that out in ways that are accessible for customers. You and I know, we're all very ADD, very time sliced-- >> Right. >> And so those small moments on social media where you can feature bits of information that get people's attention. In fact, we're running something right now, which I think has a lot of legs because at the end of the day I'm selling to a human. >> Right? >> Right. >> Right. >> So we've got B2B monikers but at the end of the day, folks are people that laugh, they cry, they want to have fun. >> Right. >> So we're running a break up with your legacy backup campaign right now. And I encourage the audience to go check it out. It's pinned on our Twitter feed at Cohesity but it pokes a little bit of fun at how you might break up with your older vendor-- >> Right. >> And that's a moment that we think captures folks attention and gets them interested so that maybe they do want to move down and read the white paper and so forth. So I look to do that through combinations of just, you know, bringing out Cohesity's incredible voice, our customer voice, and then sharing it on social because that's the way people really get their information these days. >> Right, this is really interesting cause I think the voice of the customer or the trusted referral's actually more valuable now because it's just a different problem. Before, I couldn't get information, so that was a good valuable sort, now it's really that person's my trusted filter cause I have too much information. >> Right. >> I can't, I can't take it in so that continues to be that trusted filter and conduit so I could just focus on my peers and not necessarily try to read everything that comes out. >> Exactly, you know, so as an example, Manhattan Associates is one of Cohesity's customers and we've been super thrilled to be able to feature them you know, through social, through our website, and let them talk about the benefits of moving to the platform and what they've seen. And I know, I hate to say it, but Gartner as well continues to be an incredible influence on most organizations and, but we're pleased to say that our customers chose Cohesity and we won the Gartner peer insights for data center backup software, just about a month ago. So, that again is another example of customers looking at the options that they have and voting with their voice and we'll continue to drive that message out in the variety of ways and hopefully get people engaged so that they can see that there really is a completely different way of managing your secondary data and getting a lot better efficiencies and a lot lower cost. >> Yeah, good exciting times, challenging times. The old marketing mantra, right? Half of my marketing budget's wasted, I just don't know which half. (laughing) So, you know you got to cover all your bases from the old school Gartner to the new school, having some fun, and some comedy. Well Lynn, really fun to sit down and spend a few minutes and to get deeper into the Cohesity story. >> Likewise, thank you and I'll be seeing you in Orlando, Vegas, and those other points on the compass. >> Alright, she's Lynn Lucas, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watchin' theCUBE from the Palo Alto studios. Great to see ya, we'll see ya next time. Thanks for watchin'. (upbeat music)